The partners of nVidia are going to be happy, because what comes out of the 680 and 670 is an auto overclock and an overclockable card, with locks on power increases, and therefore far, far less chance of anything burning out.

Overclock to your hearts desire - you won't be burning these up while the amd cards will still be a housefire and cost the partners plenty to replace.

Why would AMD fans be sad?AMD enjoyed a multi-months lead in performance, over-charging for their cards that had, substantially, no competitions at their price levels.Now NVIDIA made a move, and it's a very good one: AMD will need to drop the prices and I see really no reason why they couldn't, as they have just a marginally larger die size (300mm2 vs 365mm2) on the same fab/technology.

Price drop is always a win for the customers, be that an Nvidia or an AMD fanboy (or just an enthusiast). Reply

It's not like the 7970 is a bad card, it's somewhat slower at games, has more ram, is much faster at gpu compute, and is still a relatively low power offering.

There's always something better just around the corner. Buy what's best when you need it, and be happy about it :-). Give it 6 months to a year and there will be something better than the 670 as well.Reply

And I am the one who attack, I attack but not you? LOL you're so fun, don'T make me copy and paste every word lack of respect the abuse of words such as massive ignorance, stupid, everyone lies but not you... and everyone lacks of respect but not you... OMG that's extremeReply

You make excuses across the board for the amd card, and nVidia's card is a smoother experience anyway if you want to glom onto min frames - and we haven't even used things like adaptive v-sync (better min frame rates for nVidia), nor did you figure in the enormous drivers difference.

It's just such a huge gap when everything is considered it's beyond ridiculous to go for the amd card, as this amd favoring reviewer even admits.

Have your favorite brand, but you've got stretch and spin to justify it.Reply

I could just really stop answering you if that wasn't for the fact you're being so much disrespectful. I have a little problem with people lacking of respect, I have to let them know they are, even more when they do not think they are lacking respect...Reply

You have never answered anything late comer troll Galidou, you're a pure 100% trolling personal attacker right now fella in all your posts so far. You have said absolutely nothing, so it is clear you should have never posted.Reply

"You make excuses across the board for the amd card, and nVidia's card is a smoother experience[..] - and we haven't even used things like..."We? WE?? YOU are from NVIDIA???? And you post here and admit it? I think you can get fired for doing this.Or maybe you are not from nVidia but because you use a nVidia card you, for some very disturbing reason, feel like you are part of the company?Reply

Okay, first of all substantial competition is the GTX590 and the 6990, that both still beat the overpriced amd lost 3 and only won 2 compute benchmarks in that 2.5+ month evil amd price scalping period before the massive smack down the nVidia 680 delivered. Now nVidia made a third move, the 670, not the initial move as you spoke about it, and this third move is another massive smackdown on the already smacked down by the 680 failing and utterly depleted value 7970 has to endure. Nice try pretending the 1st smack down just occurred, but once again, what else to expect from an amd fanboy, and also clearly why another amd fanboy immediately thanked you a perfectly leveled headed post. LOL

Now onto your other ridiculous spew, based on facts not twisted perceptions.You note the die sizes of the competing products, and conclude by stupid first look there is no reason amd cannot drop it's price (again) - you avoid the again, twice - (once for $$$(yes 3 figures), twice for 3 games added, now a 3rd time coming ) - but whatever, let's take your die size non chalant info and do our little math amd fanboys now desperately want to avoid.

300mm sq. nVidia vs 365mm sq Amd - doesn't look so bad does it ?

Unfortunately, the Amd die is well over 40% LARGER :)

Sorry about that amd fanboy brainfart .... you forgot to multiply for AREA, hence size/cost of the wafer....

300x300 vs 365x365

90,000 nVidia wafer area vs 133,225 huge 43% + more amd wafer cost.

So let's get this straight - do you still not really see a problem ?

yankeeDDL > " AMD will need to drop the prices and I see really no reason why they couldn't, as they have just a marginally larger die size (300mm2 vs 365mm2) on the same fab/technology. "

You know what's massive, my two radeon 6870 that I paid 130$ each and still compete with those 400$ cards... That's a massive smackdown because I bought them almost A FREAKING YEAR AGO. Take that abuser of the word ''massive'' :PReply

I very recently ( a couple months ago) recommended a 6870 to a very close friend, I think the price was about $159 and it had maybe some rebate at the egg. He bought it and has been running it for his several sims, it was the best bang for the buck at the time in a level above his then current 3 or 4 running vid cards ( 4000+5000 series).

So no doubt amd can have a deal worth purchasing, it's just not there at all in these 2 new generations. Not even a tiny bit. Reply

And what's the reason for that, do you know? It's not because Nvidia IS SO FAR SUPERIOR ffs stop with that, it may be superior but it's not a civic vs a ferrari. AMD had the price/performance/die size superiority because they'Ve been doing(since radeon 4870) a shift in making the most heavy gpus in the world.

Nvidia was focusing on a more computationnal approach and biggest gpu, strongest performance since... well since it's alive I think. Nvidia simply took AMD's way for this gen, forget about compute power a little and focus on smaller die for mazimum performance and low consumption while AMD made the move the other way, improved their compute power at the cost of die size and power consumption.

That's what GCN is all about. it'S about the same thing that happened with GTX 2xx vs radeon 48xx cept that 4870 was more than TWICE smaller than GTX 2xx and almost as performant and sometimes even more. Not a mere 43% difference in die size, MORE THAN DOUBLE the size and still were so close in performance.

And why am I doing this analysis and you didn't, because you were too much occupied at launching inflammatory disrespectful stuff, like lots of nvidia fanboys do. People don't deserve this in a ''computer part'' oriented discussion. You were at the same time saying people were stupid and disrespectful while you were doing the same, let's say even worse.

Now get a neutral vision of things before commenting like you do, you wanna be a fanboy, at least do it in the light of respect. Did I call you any names now? Did I have to use the words ''stupid'', ''analphabet'', ''dumbfuck'', and so on... No because that was meaningless. Learn from the best of die like the rest.Reply

PSangry disser Galidou " And why am I doing this analysis and you didn't, "

Why you are doing this analysis is because you are a pure amd troll and have to go back to the last generation to try to make some idiotic historical point because you have no current points and no current rebuttals.

Furthermore you claim I am somehow unsound by not having made your crybaby last generation whining no real point but I have made the more pertinent point as nVidia beat amd in every single metric here.

I guess for your "win" you need to squeal about respect as you do the same trash talk, then go back to a prior generation to try to whine about what exactly ?

You having a neutral vision is one big fat joke.You're in with all the amd fanboys here telling lies and going back a generation and whining about that...

It would be nice if your snide remarks could be directed at pertinent points I have made but so far you're incapable, and often just on a troll attack against me personally in at least two of your other posts.

What were you spewing about up there anyway ? Power ? LOLGuess who loses that sonny.Reply

these are the words you currently used in about 4-5 posts of yours, I don'T want to make any point with you toward video cards related discussion because of that, these are the words you use, I just want you to realize what you do:

''Thank me when you grow up enough to realize rebutting lies and fibs by others is an adult and responsible''

The attitude words you used up there are so responsible... but no, you could just make your point and end it with a ''.'' but you ahve to add those words attacking everyone in your way, but sorry I forgot, I'm the one who attacks you, you're the perfect one... I'm maybe a troll but I'm not mad like you are.

But hey, your arguments are so right that you gotta use all this stuff in your argumentation and call everyone a mad hater. Who's the hater? I already like Nvidia I'm no AMD fanboy.Reply

I agree, the targeted "forum trusted end user alpha males" amd's pr campaign handlers coddle and coach and follow and email and bribe with free amd hardware and event tickets are gonig to be sorely pressed making up enough fanboy lies to earn their freebies. They are sad, and muted, bringing down the entire amd fanboy morale - the lies need to be too big this time - and evil amd already scapled the crap outa their fanbase, lost in their power perf area, lost in frame rate, lost their 3G future fantasy ram argument - all they have left is blowing chunks about overclocking the unstable poor drivers 7000 series - not to mention the GTX570 slamming their 78xx series, and a single GTX680 outselling their entire 78xx series at the egg... I've seen more than one reviewer mention the 680 back orders were so great and the 79xx and 78xx sales so stalled, that they hoped for some kind of change... now the egg is full of 670's... amd fanboys need a whole wheel barrel full verdetrol just to not off themselvesReply

I guess you're so ignorant you didn't read the fired AMD employees testimonies concerning and explaining their "use" of amd fanboys, preferably the "trusted alpha male" type from long established forums all over the web, including anand's here. If you're entirely clueless, as you are, you have a lot of homework to do to be able to understand. Now, with your rude attack due to your personal ignorance above, I think all of us can fairly completely ignore your sad, pathetic, amd pro backing smack talk comment above that, where put down the entire comments section as an argumentative and sad place. Kind of ironic that after trying to defend another amd fanboy who smarted back about not being sad, you wound up saying this place is sad, and yes we've all seen your amd favoritism for some time now. You are sad, amd has lost, and has been forced down into shame by their superior, nVidia.Reply

LoL Cerise is still here launching inflammatory stuff at everyone who says something about AMD. Look at the mad Nvidia fanboy crying setting fire to the rain...

Whoever loses, you don't have to get so MUCH mad when speaking of computer parts, they are freaking computer parts, not women intimate parts... get laid before speaking of ignorance...

Why is it always the nvidia fanboys who gets so mad, are they freaking lacking real life sex so they become obsessed by video cards. I don't even want to think at what kind of picture they look at when they try to evacuate the pressure.... NO I DON'T...Reply

Omg he's just a troll and you have fallen into his trap. Went me talking to the walls painted 6 months ago....Ah but maybe the troll reads this and replies. And if he's a mad troll he will copy my comments store it in a .txt. or .doc and use it "against" me in future ..."fights" Pfff! Sayonara suckers!Reply

I think that just answered my last question. Just sad to see someone who gather this information to use it like you do, good job.

''You are sad, amd has lost, and has been forced down into shame by their superior, nVidia. ''

I think the only one who lost, it's you. You lost your sanity just for speaking about video card companies, according so much importance to it while it's so much irrelevant. 90% of the people will continue going to best buy and get a geforce 8600gt or a Radeon 2600xt for 120$ thinking they got the deal of the year because it has a 30$ rebate on it and allow them to run their game at 720p. GGReply

Ah yes, another whose only "information" in 2 consecutive posts is 100% personal attack. Thank me when you grow up enough to realize rebutting lies and fibs by others is an adult and responsible thing to do. Something you obviously are absolutely incapable of, since expertise is not in your arsenal.

BTW - the gentleman who had to be corrected on his lackluster amd excuse concerning gpu core size vs amd's ability to for the 3td time in a few months, reduce prices, it has been pointed out, lied about the nVidia core size exaggerating it's dimensions (by mistake of course!).

ROFL hahahha - you pathetic amd fanboys have to lie all the time....

Not 300mm, 294mm sonny boy. ROFL

When it's so bad no lie is too big or too small, this is what happens - this is what we're (well not you of course, you're just an attacking troll) dealing with.Reply

LoL you're still so much into it's almost like you wanna make me feel that you're gonna save the world with your knowledge. Pollution will be eradicated by the light of your mesurements(in milimeters that is).

Sorry if my english ain't at your level, maybe why you beleive I'm young, but it is in fact my third language. The only fanboy here is you, I know that this 670 is AMAZING, if I were in the market for a 300$ video card with what I see now, I'd dish an extra 100 to get it without hesitation.

OMG sonny boy you had to mention this like it was all the supernatural 6mm difference... who gives a darn but you... If you're that old and ''responsible'' commenting like you do about video cards, WOW, it's even worse than I think, the word responsible might even have to change definition just because of you.

I have never seen someone so irresponsible in forums when speaking about video cards. And I'm not the only one who might think that way for sure.

You'Ve been doing personnal attacks on this forum on a regular basis and all that because of what, because of your knowledge in video cards. I'd prefer to be the most stupid man on earth instead of using any form of knowledge the way you do.Reply

I never said your discussions were fulled with lies or anything, it's just the way you bring up your argumentation. It makes me feel like not everyone will listen to you because of that. You do it in a harsh way and bring everyone down with you at the same time.

You think calling everyone an ignorant is really necessary to explain anything related to the topic even if their argumentation is flawed? I don't think so. I already know Nvidia won for this gen, and they won big time. It's nice to see some nice bang for your bucks at the top, and I mean, if it wasn't for the fact that I only run in 1080p and the most anticipated game I'll play is diablo 3, I'd get one right now. But darn it dude, calm down...Reply

Aha! Busted! You are looking forward for AMD to get broke, closed so we would all be forced to buy video cards from only one corporation: nVidia. Because that way your share of money will get bigger. You greedy bastard!Reply

Yes, don't forget to personally attack me, use the usual blabber the most ignorant and clueless fools on the net use to do so, it's a very short list, so it won't be too hard for you unless you try to remember how to spell basement. Now back to the topic I brought up.It's a sad time for amd fanboys and no amount of lies can help.After the reviewer smacked down all 79xx CF setups as not able to recommend, we have this very next follow up review - and it's easy to say everyone is absolutely amazed by the massive performance of this next step nVidia GTX670 - beating amd and their fanboys at the very heart and I do mean their dark little love it to death fanboy talking point amd heart - die size / power use / price perf / fan noise...

It's a total and complete smackdown, exceeding even in muliti monitor with the nVidia 3+1surf - a complete smackdown - no area left for the and fanboy to grab onto - extreme sadness the era has ended.

Consolation prize is vehemently claiming amd "OC's better", but it's a very difficult and voltage increasing road of heat and instability to that little nugget - while the nVidia fan comfortably uses a new technology for OC, and "enjoys some OC anyway" even without touching a thing, if we are to believe the angry and defeated amd fans protestations..Reply

Oh more personal attacking ?You can have your opinion, even if it's ridiculous and stupid, and rest assured, I may use the facts to prove that it is, and thus, you may whine I seem to think only my opinion is valid.

I see now you went on a half page excuse rant for amd in the prior page trying to justify it's terrible loss with much spinning and distortions - look buddy, why don't you take some of your own advice ?

It's obviously very important to you, given your actions - so it would be better if you made more attempts like the one I just referred to, and also had the guts to correct those spinning and lying for amd, as then I wouldn't be so busy.

We can thank snakefist for pointing out past page 25 here that the nVidia core size is 294mm on a side not 300mm - so there we go again, another lie by an amd fan corrected...

( to be fair there was some misinformation concerning that comporting to the error the poster made)

Thanks for telling me to read my own posts, I assure you I do, although now I've skipped reading your entire rant on the prior page. It's laughable BTW.

How about someone ban you for just being a smart aleck, isn't that what a zealout of no use whatsoever really is ? Are you going to claim this is your joke and rip on others place ? Why didn't you check availability or read about it in the article the reviewer in fact went into quite some detail and extrapolation on the differences between this and the 680 and 690, but you never read the review did you ? You just come here to attack others and smart off for amd points.Reply

This should make the amd fans happy, immense amd bias by the reviewer, again.TWS2" The GTX 570 and it’s increasingly puny 1.25GB of RAM can’t even run this game with our 2560 benchmark settings "What the reviewer forgets to mention is that at 2560 and their benchmark settings not a single card present is playable, all under 29 fps and the majority under 20.ROFL

That might be entirely different without the new game patch bug that affects only nVidia, but the very fact that the reviewer moans about "the 570" "puny ram" problem while noting a COMPLETELY UNPLAYABLE GAME BENCHMARK FROM THE HIGHEST TIERED 3G RAM AMD FLAGSHIP CARD... Where exactly is the brain ?

This is the kind of crap we have to put up with here, at least we who have a brain and can see what's going on. I guess the amd fanboys can thank the reviewer for further perpetuation of the ram bottleneck MYTH. What a JOKE ATTACK on the nVidia card.Worse yet, on the very next page, the very same GTX570 beats the amd opposition 2G ram 7870 at 2560 but it can't be mentioned.Reply

28 isn't playable and yes, the nVidia card really wins that game, as we see in the 680 test, which I had to point out as you, the amd fanboy despite your claim to own a 680, never noticed like all the rest, including the author to a large degree, in the 680 release review here.

So take your temporary Gaming Evolved amd game driver hack that disabled nVidia's winning sweep across all resolutions and celebrate, a fool of course needs to do so, you're welcome for pointing it out.

Such a troll again, such a lack of respect, indirect attacks, most useless comment on earth... immense ignorance, comon we're speaking about video cards, someone not knowing that you can change a buck for 4 quarters might be an ignorant... unless he's a tribal that lived in africa all his life... and then the ''again'' omg the inflammatory stuff you're able to say in 7 words sentence... I'm unsure you realize what you do... you're being really mean...

All that and I could only say you're mean... I guess respect ain't give to everyone, sad it can't be bought, because it must be the most important value, ALL AROUND, a man can have. Everything starts with respect, real wisdom is acquired through respect.Reply

All you do is attack, this is the last response you get from me unless you're on topic with a point, and as respectful as you demand others be, which you are not, you're the worst so far, a pure troll with no points at all.

The other posters are trying to make points, not you. Attention for you is over.Reply

He mentions the puny 1,25gb because the card CAN'T run it and is usually a good performer against the competition at that resolution. You say it beats the 7870 in the next page, by 1-2 fps, I don't even call that a beating. Plus in a game that favors Nvidia.

''This is the kind of crap we have to put up with here, at least we who have a brain and can see what's going on.''

I think you meant ''we who are Nvidia's fanboys''

It may not be the most neutral of comments but it's not the worst, you're just looking to find things against Nvidia and enumerate them because that's what Nvidia's fanboys do. What do they do, get mad as soon as there's a little reason to.Reply

No other card can run it with gaming frame rates in his test.Since he didn't point that out, I DID.

I guess he'll have to work harder to find a valid reason to dis the card since he has claimed nVidia is keeping it on, and the egg sure looks like that is correct - a lot of stock present.

Now, you validated my point, but want to call it petty, but a similar thing happens on nearly every gaming page.

At least what I point out is some pathetic grammar nazi problem, huh, which all of the rest of you seem to love to do so much, in every review posting it appears to be a contest for that, and I agree with the reviewer that PM'ing him to offer a correction is actually adult like and responsible.

That of course is different than what bothers me, and we shall see, a valid complaint is usually responded to in a good way, so there may be some thought ahead, I certainly expect positive results for my efforts. As is so often claimed here by those in charge they respond to readers and what they want, so this fits that case fine.

On that note along those lines I already advocated a single gaming chart with the collated data of the various cards in their overclocked performance states, as it seems to me that would be a nice added feature to reviews and would settle some of the rancor on the reviewed cards sometimes having OC'ed versions added in their release.Reply

Nevermind, I knew why but I hadn't seen it mentioned yet.http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/johan-an...So .. buying a graphics board because it is favored by a botched graphical engine which is temporary - meh. If you plan on keeping your pc 2 or 3 years, fck the marketing, get raw power instead ;)Reply

As scook9 mentioned, warhead is an TWIMTBP and yet runs better on 7970.It'd be better if you removed that tin foil hat. TWIMTBP and Gaming Evolved are programs to help developers code their games better.There are countless TWIMTBP games that run better on radeons.

Crysis and warhead use an old engine that isn't going to be used anymore. Nowadays they are just obsolete benchmarks.

Metro 2033 is a very nice game and I really liked it, but it's not that popular and has a proprietary engine. Most gamers don't care about such engine.

Frostbite, OTOH, matters because it belongs to a major publisher/developer which means we'll see many games based on it in the future.Reply

Just because an engine is going to be used anymore doesn't mean it isn't useful to gauge certain aspects of a videocard. Many engines that will be used are not even developed yet, some may push a card more like the Crytech engine did.

Crytech 2 is going to be used for MechWarrior online baby. (Im glad it used a good engine, and it looks like they are using it to good effect).Reply

BF3 has sold 1.9 million copies worldwide.Metro 2033 has sold 0.16m copies worldwideCrysis is an old game that I don't see (m)any people playing.

BF3 is also scheduled for three DLC releases (two this year, third next year).

I see a perfectly good reason why BF3 performance matters. You are speculating that the 7900-series will have great Unreal 4 performance. That's just silly since nobody knows anything about Unreal 4 performance yet.

The only thing I could find was Hexus.net reporting that nVidia chose the Kepler to demonstrate the Unreal 4 engine at the GDC.Reply

On the other hand a GTX 560 may not be the newest card in its price bracket, outdated seems to be a harsh word. You still get the same performance you paid for, it's not going to drop just because something newer came out.

My 5870 was 2 1/2 years old, cost me 384$ at the time, The price/performance stayed relevant right until the 680GTX came out.Reply

Exactly, I was running a GTX 285, and it didn't { slow down} when the new cards came out. Decide what card you want and be happy, the next new card is always on the way, and your card won't be the bestest forever.

I was lucky and camped newegg when the GTX 680's came out and scored, very good card, but that being said AMD's cards are very nice too and I would be more than happy with one of those too, but I invested in a 3D setup so I am kind of stuck in Nvidia land for now.

As far as I can see, all of the high end cards are really nice, decide which one is for you and be happy, don't feel like you need to justify your purchase to unknown people on the internet.Reply

Finally someone that doesn't put down one brand over the other just to justifiy his purchase. In the end these cards are plenty enough for most resolutions and games. If 3d and physx and such is something important to you go Nvidia and if Compute and zero core tech is important go AMD. The fact that both companies are strong only improves the product and price.Reply

Way over 2 grand baby. That strikes down the one lie for amd, no points amd fan. Onto the second talking point - zero core - it shows about 3 watts difference at idle, but once a person uses the card, the 7970 loses hours of advantage doing nothing in a few minutes, hence it's power bill cost will be much more anyway. That's another zero points for amd.

I'll wait till you think of something that isn't a big fat lie and trick to claim the amd cards are "good too"....

If you're going to be a good fair and peaceful person willing to bring together the forum you had better come up with something solid for amd.

We don't get to just say it's all even steven because amd loses so miserably, and then pretend it's true, while (you) spewing an outright lie and deception (firepro) and a secondary loss as a win (power).Reply

Sure, plenty, plenty, plenty here never use it, and now they have one thing they can use it for with an amd card - winzip-

Count your many blessings amd fan.

What a joke you people are.There are nVidia driver hacks available BTW - whereby you can increase perf of the many released nVidia gaming cards and attempt some grand performance, but of course you guys have done that already for the past 3 generations like your opposition here, huh....

And here comes the fanboy to break the dream of neutrality, we will never be alone. We just said we were happy that someone commented about whatever brand people buy, as long as you are happy with your purchase.

''Perception is what matters, someone who buys a honda civic can be as happy as someone who buys a Ferrari, sure the feeling of driving it will be different. But in the end, it's the perception towards life that matters.Reply

lol twist the words any way you want. They will never mean what you want them to mean.

The 7970 came out at 570$ and I didn't think it was a bad value. But at the same time its no 2900XT or 5800ultra.

Right now I do feel Nvidia offers a better value. But their are situations, in very high resolutions and on certain games that AMD performs better. Why you cannot see that Nvidia isn't total domination is beyond me.Reply

lol twist the words any way you want. They will never mean what you want them to mean.

The 7970 came out at 570$ and I didn't think it was a *good* value. But at the same time its no 2900XT or 5800ultra.

Right now I do feel Nvidia offers a better value. But their are situations, in very high resolutions and on certain games that AMD performs better. Why you cannot see that Nvidia isn't total domination is beyond me. Reply

PS- even though twisted, my point is still 100% valid, and negates the whole pile from chizow, so it means exactly what I said it meant, but putting two and two together is not your strong suit.

You went from 5870, skipped the crappy 6970 generation, die shrink, core jump, because it sucked.

You also passed over the overpriced amd 7970.

chizow whines a lot, but you proved him wrong, and used the method I outlined and said most would do and most owning cards have done, not his stupid retentive one upgrade path only dumb as heck complaint.Reply

With nVidia card you can just use the upcoming automatic game settings - another gigantic nVidia driver advantage over amd's crap. It's getting far too embarrassing to support amd's crap anymore - there are now numerous absolute fails on amd's part. It was bad enough when amd didn't pay for PhysX, failed to have openCL in the drivers, had 3 features unchecked in gpu-z that nvidia had covered, failed in DX11 tessellation, was still plagued by the all in wonder corner mouse cursor bug from win98, had no ambient occlusion, cannot support cards going back to the equivalent of nVidia 8 series - but now they're so hammered by so many nVidia advantages beyond all those issues it is embarrassing to the point of humiliating. No adaptive v-sync now enabled all the way back for nVidia 8 series No frame rate target No on the fly power saving adaptive OC. No 4th monitor for surfing next to the surround eyefinity triples No driver present taskbar centering for triple monitor (addon amd) No sneak peek bezel driver support --- I'll stop because the list is so enormous now - and amd cannot even get working CF drivers going yet for half the games, while nVidia releases with SLI mastery. NVidia is in a superior position across the board - price, performance, power, drivers, added features, extra features, game day driver releases, and soon a driver optimizer (June ) that they make with their GPU server farms - actually pumping out the work for the gamer - something the embarrassed amd I guess is entirely absent on - while they fire more and more employees - making any sane person clearly see why the drivers that were already suffering are now even worse. AMD needs to be about half the price of nVidia hardware.Reply

...except that nvidia can't seem to make more than a few dozen at a time.

It's pathetic that they're pricing the only two GTX600-series cards to undercut AMD, yet they can't seem to build them. Pretty clever marketing gimmick. You price cards so they undercut the competition, and everybody salivates at the prospect of buying one and decides not to buy the AMD card... except they're not really available. Pretty cheap ploy from one of the most hated companies in the business.

I'd be surprised if half of nvidia's board partners didn't go out of business or jump ship to AMD after this supply fiasco.Reply

This is the 3rd gtx600 series cards, but expecting you to be correct is worse than betting on the broken watch. GTX680 at newegg has outsold the entire amd 7870 and 7850 line up. Maybe your bean counting should be directed to the corporate pig loser amd ? At least with nVidia the partners can unload a million backorders when the supply irons out, and 2.5 months after release amd's finally ironed out... it was pathetic until then, so the very thing you spew about partners bailing already happened to amd right ? I mean let's keep your insane spewing consistent across the competition, why not that would be fair.. Congratulations on being so incapable of making a point.nVidia's partners are counting the backorders and cannot count that high, now they have the even more impressive and winning GTX670 to unload - destroying amd's entire top line. What were you saying about nVidia partners ? Did your "unconscious" amd inner fanboy totally go bonkers and into insane projection mode ? It's amd partners that are in trouble now. LOLReply

Wasn't caught ? LOL Sounds correct, at least in your mind. Problem is when amd is caught red handed, none of you amd fanboys have a clue about it, ever. Now I don't have anything against AMD, it's just clear the truth should be told, as I said let's apply the amd fanboy talking points equally, let's do a real analysis and not with instant amnesia that favors amd or ignores the current facts like egg sales. I have noticed you amd fans have a real hatred for nVidia and all say a similar thing as you just did. It's like poor loser syndrome but I don't think any of you are faking it, I think you are living it in your minds. That's really sad. I do believe that's why you can so blindly deny facts and are so often excuse makers and liars for amd and against nVidia quite unfairly. Cut out the hate man. nVidia isn't somehow worse than amd, nor vise versa.

Now I assure you, my post you went into attack mode over above is very simply my on the fly instant analysis by assembling the known facts. It includes principles like what's good for the goose is also fair on the gander, and very simple logic, and some actual original thoughts, etc.

My apologies that I am so excessively astute and can easily see though the amd fud monkey tp, and worse yet, right, show easily the actual nVidia advantage in that very area.

Go to new egg and click on the best selling EVGA GTX680, go to the reviews tab, click the verified buys checkmark, and read the number of verified buyers of the total commenters. That gives you a fair estimate that will be about the same as fair estimates for other products ( it eliminates counting spammers who just have to post without purchasing ).

So just go do that also for the 7870 and 7850 and add up all the totals, and of course include on the 7870 and 7850 and out of stock cards, the "up to 5 eggs" reviews are available for out of stock...

Compare your totals, if you don't know how to navigate new egg efficiently the tip you need is use the "Guided Results" tab on the upper left area once you have clicked into "Desktop Graphics Hardware" from the "shop all stores" yellow upper left start button.

So anyway, 680 was 108 verified a few days ago and all the 7870 and 7850 combined in total were below that by like 30 something - only a single 680 sku was needed, making it easier to collate in the nVidia side.

It should take you all of 3 minutes to verify this right now, and given the level of competence in this post area, here's some helpful starts

The price gauging is always a product when the underdog in a market (not necessarily in performance) outdoes the big boss. We saw this happen back when AMD brought out the A64 as well or when ATI released R300 chip. So from consumer's $$$ point of view underdog should stay underdog but deliver performance that matches the big boss.Reply

That's a failed analysis since the price gouging by the same complainers is always present on the flagship models. The true analysis is the honest and common sense one. No matter what anyone's twisted brain calls the competers, when any one in competition throws up a leader board item, they charge for it. What's shameful in amd's case is the very quick slap down they experienced - smacking $579.99 down to $449.99(or 479) then the second whallop sending them to the deck, the 3 games they offered to attempt to keep interest going, and now another knockout punch square to the drooling amd choppers as they wobbled on noodle legs still getting the former ten count - the GTX670 tag team card with the new smack down.... I suspect amd will try to maintain some sort of composure and self esteem this time by not budging as long as they possibly can... because it's embarrassing already and now the GTX670 has turned amd from bright pink to their standard red color - flush to the point of passing out. Yes, amd will pretend now - pretend it doesn't have to drop prices again.Reply

Except in this case, the "underdog" AMD initiated this pricing debacle with the terribly overpriced 7970 and the "leader" Nvidia was content to follow, selling their mid-range ASIC GK104 as a high-end SKU.

While Nvidia did improve the situation with their GK104 pricing, its still by far, the worst increase we've seen from a price:performance perspective in the last decade of GPUs.Reply

You're in the GTX670 review, it's $399, it has come out fast, and it's awesome and beats the more epxensive flagship 7970, and destroys and historical price/perf you've got handy.Utter decimates it.Best in years, best in a decade is now the line you should be using for the GTX670.Reply

don't buy it if you can't afford it, other people will gladly take your place in line. I'm just glad we have some next gen products from both companies to choose from. If anything we are very fortunate to have so many products available that can max out all our games at present.Reply

Its not a matter of being able to afford it, its about standards and expectations, which I'm not willing to lower for substandard offerings for products that are neither essential for survival nor expire on their own due to wear.

They're high-priced toys and nothing more and there's *PLENTY* of other distractions in that endless category of entertainment to compete with, especially when these new offerings don't offer compelling reasons to upgrade over my last-gen $500 GPUs.

The other consideration is buying these parts at high premiums sets a bad precedence, where the consumer gets *LESS* for their money and similarly gives Nvidia free reign to set a new bar for premium price and performance in the future.

We've already gotten a taste of this with the GTX 690 for $1000!!! What do you think is next with GK110? Why don't you look historically at the reaction to the 8800 Ultra at $830? Nvidia is *STILL* trying to downplay that part and justify their pricing decisions, but with a mid-range ASIC like GK104 selling for $500 premium flagship prices, Nvidia is once again positioned to sell an "Ultra" part at ultra-premium pricing. For what? A part that performs as you would've expected from a $500 flagship to begin with, roughly +50% more than the last-gen flagship.....Reply

Maybe if you provided a percentage with a simple texted chart, heck you don't need to do ten years, the doubter could gauge the level of your sourness properly - after all .01% less of a jump in performance below the worst jump in the last ten years fits all of your descriptions 100%. So why are you moaning about .01% ?Reply

Well when the 7970 came out that was by far the worst. Its alot better now, but I agree this jump hasn't been one for value at all. People don't remember the great videocards I guess. The 5870 was the last one in my eyes.Reply

5870 jumped from the 4890. Now please, let's see this enormous perf increase somewhere... as compared to the current. No less than that, the 5870 was replaced by the 6870, also not so great a leap. We keep hearing about these ephemeral perf increases, but so far NO ONE, and I mean NO ONE has provided even a simple percent increase chart - and you know why ? Because you people love to quaff out moaning fantasies like "double performance" and says things like "the great GTX880 !" (after of course bitching for a four years it was extremely overpriced and not ever worth it). So let's see it my friends, where pray tell is this great alluded to but never actually defined gigantic performance increase now not seen ? 4890-5870-6970 ????Come on now, let's have one of you true believers gum up the work and give us a good percentage comparison we don't have to rip apart for immense biased game picking. Should take one of you all but 10 minutes. Charts are everywhere.Use the anand bench for cripes sakes, I'm sick of hearing the moanings and fantasies with no simple effort of a comonly available percentage - and you know why - because I'm calling BS ! Now - let's see it !Reply

No the 5870 was replaced by the 6970. The 5870 was faster then the 6870.

The wall was coming, since the 9700pro that needed a power adapter, to videocards that need 2 power adapters and took 2 slots. That was how they got those 2 and even 4x increases. the 9700pro was as much as 6x faster then a 4600 at times.

But like I said this wall was coming and from now on expect all performance improvements to be based on architecture and node improvements.Reply

How can I disagree as obviously you are another internet blogger CEO - one of the many thousands we now have online with corporate business school degrees and endless babbling about profits without a single price cost for a single component of a single video card discussed under your belts. It's amazing how many of you tell us who can cut prices and remain profitable - when none of you have even the tiniest inkling of the cost of any component whatsoever, let alone the price it's sold at by nVidia or amd for that matter. I'm glad so many of you are astute and learned CEO mind masters, though.Reply

You really don't need to be an internet blogger or CEO, you don't even need a business degree although it certainly wouldn't hurt (especially in accounting).

Just a rudimentary understanding of financial statements and you can easily understand Nvidia's business model, then see when and why they are most successful financially by looking at the market landscape and what products were selling and for how much.

I can tell you right now, Nvidia was at its most profitable during G80 and G92's run of success (6 straight quarters of record profits that have been unmatched since), so we know for a fact what kind of revenues, margins and ASPs for components they can succeed with by looking at historical data.Reply

G92's were the most wide ranging selection of various cores hacks, bit width, memory config, etc- and released a enormous amount of different card versions - while this release is a flagship only tier thus far - so they don't relate at all. So no, you're stuck in the know exactly nothing spot I claimed you are, no matter what you spew about former releases. Worse than that, nVidia profit came from chipset sales and high end cards then - and getting information to show the G80 G92 G92b G94 etc profitability by itself will cost you a lot of money buying industry information. So you know nothing again, and tried to use a false equivalency. Thanks for trying though, and I certainly won't say you should change your personal stance on pricing of the "mid tier" 680, on the other hand I don't see you making a reasonable historical pricing/ performance/current prices release analysis - you haven't done that, and I've been reading all of your comments of course, and otherwise often agree with you. As I've said, the GTX580 was this year $499 - the 7970 released and 2.5 months later we're supposed to see the 580 killer not just at $499, but at $299 as the semi-accurate rumors and purported and unbelievable "insider anonymous information" rumors told us - that $299, since it was so unbelievable if examined at all, has become $399, or maybe $449, or $420, whatever the moaner wants it to be... I frankly don't buy any of it - and for good reason - this 680 came in as it did because it's a new core and they stripped it down for power/perf and that's that - and they drove amd pricing down. Now they're driving it down further. If the 680 hit at $299 like everyone claimed it was going to (bouncing off Charlie D's less than honest cranium and falling back on unquoted and anonymous "industry wide" claimed rumors or a single nVidia slide or posted trash prediction charts proven to be incorrect), then where would the 670 be priced at now ? $250 ? I suggest the performance increase along with the massive driver improvement bundle and keeping within the 300watt power requirements means that there is nowhere else to go right now. The "secret" "held back" performance is nowhere - the rumored card not here yet is a compute monster - so goodbye power/perf win and the giant PR advantage not to mention the vast body of amd fanboys standing on that alone - something nVidia NEVER planned to lead with this time - the big Kepler. It's not that nVidia outperformed itself, it's that their secrecy outperformed all the minds of the rabble - and all that's left is complainers who aren't getting something for nothing or something for half price as they hoped.Reply

2) High-end enthusiasts who actually felt the GTX 680 was worthy of its premium price tag, paid the $500 asking price and often, more to get them. Only to see that premium completely eroded by a card that performs within a few % points, yet costs 20% less and is readily available on the market.

Talk about losing insane value overnight, you don't need to run a business to understand the kind of anger and angst that can cause.Reply

Well, the $$ BURN $$ is still less than the $$ BURN $$ the amd flagship cost - $130 + and that's the same card, not a need to be overclocked lower shader cut version. So as far as angry dollar burning, yeah, except amd has done worse in dollar costs than nvidia, and with the same card. Nice to know, hopefully your theory has a lot fo strong teeth, then the high end buyers can hold back and drive the price down... ( seems a dream doesn't it )Reply

Yes I've said from Day 1 the 7970 was horribly overpriced; it was just an extension of the 40nm price:performance curve 18 months after the fact.

But that doesn't completely let Nvidia off the hook since they obviously used AMD's weak offering as the launching point to use a mid-range ASIC as their high-end SKU.

End result is the consumer gets the SMALLEST increase in performance for their money in the last decade of GPUs. I don't understand why this is so hard for you to understand. Look at the benchmarks, do the math and have a seat.Reply

Products actually have to be consistently available for significant price drops like what you want to happen. Right now, if you need a high end card TODAY, waiting around for a GTX 680 isn't really an option, you'll have to go for the 7970 and AMD knows that.Reply

Nope, 670 is all over the egg. Sorry you're late with that crap, and it's USA only BTW concerning 680 - the rest of the non obama world isn't suffering and can you really blame the asain(China/ commie cap government) manufacturers ?Reply

That's what happens when you don't understand the manufacturing process you're moving to. You design a chip that's so ambitious, the failure rate is spectacular. AMD (and ATI before) on the other hand are much more familiar with the limits of successive process technology at TSMC, hence they are getting higher yields per wafer despite having a slightly larger die size, even without neutering their GPGPU compute circuitry like nvidia did.Reply

If you read them on nVidia, and it is painful to see the twisted incoherent lies and completely contradictory links that disprove his stated reason for posting them or simply do not contain what he claimed they do, any bit of weight is too much weight at all. It's an amd fanboy firestarter flamer site, charlie's biggest purchase is red tipped matches and gasoline in a red can.Reply

Can't agree with this for a lot of reasons. Maybe in the past with the huge GPU dies, but GK104 is *SMALLER* than Tahiti so there's really nothing ambitious about it.

For capacities, Nvidia and TSMC have very close relationships and we know for a fact Nvidia is selling 2 GPUs for every 1 of AMDs, so Nvidia has an advantage there in terms of orders placed as well.

There's no reason to believe Nvidia is at any process disadvantage relative to AMD on 28nm, if anything everyone is supply constrained as other players try to move in (like Apple).

The fact there's plenty of GTX 670s still available after 3 days after launch with EXTREMELY favorable reviews tells me supply is excellent, and that Nvidia is only supply constrained on the high-end with perfect ASICs splitting good die between GTX 680 and 690.Reply

Per usual Ryan, very relevant observations and interesting insight in regard to the changes Nvidia has made.

I think I would take some of your first page insights a bit further:

1) GTX 680 is probably already heavily "overclocked" and binned to achieve a SKU Nvidia may not have planned originally, in order to beat the 7970 with a mid-range ASIC.

2) We will probably see an even more heavily harvested GK104 chip soon, given how little GTX 670 cuts from GTX 680 (just 1 SMX), but Nvidia can't cut too much without significantly impacting performance.

3) Pricing as you've laid out nicely, is probably $50-$100 too high across the board for all of these 28nm parts somewhere in the +20-25% premium range based on relative performance and historical pricing.

There's quite a few minor grammar errors throughout your article, nothing a quick proofread won't correct, but the content is excellent as usual.Reply

If AMD responds with another 7970 like price-drop on the 7950 and can get it down to the low $300 range, I may wind up owning my first AMD card ever. Although, I'm not holding my breath for such a dramatic decrease.Reply

I've bought AMD once, but was very happy with it.Specifically, a 9500 256bit that unlocked into a 9700.

Kept it for quite a while, skipping Geforce 6 and 7 series, as well has ATI X1 and X2 series. I was very glad I did so, because my next upgrade was the 8800GT which was IMO the best bang-for-the-buck GPU ever made.Reply

What on Earth did you buy that sucked so hard? I'm genuinely interested - I've been buying cards from both sides since the GeForce DDR and the only bad product I ever got was a failtastic G86-based mobile part. That black mark aside both vendors have served me well.Reply

"The only other change you’ll notice is that <b>NVIDIA</b> is using their own high flow bracket in place of NVIDIA’s bracket. The high flow bracket cuts away as much metal as possible, maximizing the area of the vents. Though based on our power and temperature readings, this doesn’t seem to have notably impacted the GTX 670 SC."

To be clear, our policy is no COMPETING OC cards in a launch article. You guys have specifically indicated that you want us to avoid the FTW scenario. If someone launches a competing card at the same time as another major launch, that card will be in a separate article and judged as such.

However we've bundled retail cards into reviews for quite some time; this isn't any kind of change. It allows us to quickly cover semi-custom cards that are similar to the original while not being redundant.Reply

It's extra data being presented. If you don't want to read it, just ignore it. It doesn't hurt the review in any way. If anything it shows that an overclocked 7950 has NO CHANCE to match an overclocked 670. The direct competitor to the 7950 is therefore superior based on this review. It's not necessary to see HD7950 oced vs. 670 per say given the massive performance lead in games such as BF3, Batman AA, etc. HD7950 no longer makes any sense for $399. Reply

Well some people here are always too quick to blame fanboys on logical arguments and facts:

"With performance that comes awfully close to a fully enabled GK104, the GTX 670 poses a nightmare scenario for AMD. Fresh off a round of price drops, they now have to contend with a card that retails for the same price as a HD 7950 but runs dead even with a HD 7970 in everything except multi monitor resolutions. To add insult to injury, the Radeon cards fight a losing battle in the performance per watt and acoustics categories as well. Free game offer or not, without another $50 to $75 shaved off, we can’t think of a single scenario where a gamer should choose a Tahiti-based card over the GTX 670. "http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canu...Reply

You know, anyone can pick a set of games and draw a seemingly mathematical conclusion and still be dead wrong at the end. Point being, If you like buying good hardware for cheap, don't take tainted titles into account, it'll only lead to more vendor sponsoring of games, more expensive hardware, more crap for nothing.

Frostbite 2 was developed WITH nVidia, it artificially favors their tech and that's not in our interest is it ?

That HWC and others follow the same trend makes no diff bro, they all want your mullah ;)Reply

" AMD partnered with SEGA and Creative Assembly on Total War: Shogun 2 through the AMD Gaming Evolved program to implement DirectX® 11 features into the game. Richard Gardner, the Lead Graphics Developer for the game discusses these features and how AMD effectively supported the Shogun 2 team."http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0eZEdpsgjk

Now, after nVidia was whomping amd in this most difficult game of all the benchmarks here, a new, no doubt, Gaming Evolved coached and inspired patch for the game "broke the nVidia cards"...

Way to go evil amd, you said you'd never be evil but clearly scalping, proprietary openCL winzip hacked into only your corner, and GE hacking are now all part and parcel of evil amd.

Lepton > " Ever since 6870 launch you had strict policy of no OC cards in launch articles yet you did it again. Where's the consistency? "

Would you like to go see the 7950 launch article here that has a stock, and two extra 7950 OC cards... ?How can you amd fans be so blind and ignorant, I mean you "know about a strict policy", but when like yesterdays amd card came out with 2 screaming overclocks for a total of 3 at once amd release only, you like -- faded into oblivion, before and after ?You are not a particle. No way, not worthy dude.Reply

Now that both AMD and Nvidia have competitive 28nm products, one would hope that competition will drive down the price. However, that will only happen if Nvidia can actually meet demand and deliver enough product. Here is hoping the 670 will eventually sell for $350...Reply

In other words, you calim nVidia has met product demand with the 680 as it drove down amd prices - right ? You said prices will go down now only IF nVidia can meet demand, and you meant the 670 since that's the article. Since prices already went down on 7970, you clearly believe nVidia has met demand with the 680 as it drove down that amd price... Now, the other fellow already agreed with you but one definitely has to wonder why, as it makes him appear just as clueless to your self contradicting statements. If not thanks for claiming nVidia has met 680 demand.(roll eyes at the tut tut blabbery again)Reply

When I compare what nVidia offers to what amd is offering, the 7970 is an embarrassment. Drivers and features on amd's side are pathetic in comparison - problems are an order of magnitude worse - 10X, while features on amd's side are now so lesser in quantity as to be absolutely definitive in negating choosing the amd product. Clearly I am not in favor of the amd product.The prices of the top tiers in the $350 -$500 range are what they have been for some time. Of course I want lower prices like near everyone else, but it seems to me, ignoring my personal opinion which so many amd fanboys fail to comprehend let alone adhere to in any small degree by their very words all over these pages, I cannot claim for them that the 7970 @ $450 with 3 free games is overpriced - they want it, they all love to claim it is better, obviously it is not, given their consumer mindset, overpriced. In fact with their stances and attitude, it should be $499 or a bit more, let's say $529 or even $549 with the added 3 games.

That's far and away from my personal opinion. Since the 7970 in fact is worse than the 670, and the 670 is $399, the 7970 could remain at $449 (a single cheapest Powercolor price) with it's 3 games and I wouldn't complain, certainly neither should the amd fanboys, of which here there are many.

Separate even from that, I don't see room for the 7970 @ $349 or $329 ( where it really should be vs the 670 @ $399 )- when that means the gtx590 and the hd6990 need to spot in only slightly over that - not to mention the crunching down of the gtx580 and gtx570 below $349 - so the problem is, how does everything below these two core flagship cards fit under them, and in the case of the 6990 and 590 just over them - not to forget the 580 that this year was $499 solid as a rock...

So, no I'm not given to a price complaint right now. The 7970 @ $579.99 was a fantasy raping scalper price amd went with - and it's utter destruction so quickly, with another blow now over's it's crumbling $449($479) + 3 games is a real problem for amd.

Like I said before, I don't amd budging from $449, although their official price is currently $479 I believe, so they might go $449 w the 3 games they Officially claim are a $100 value, so in a sense amd is already positioned with the 7970 $349 - a pathetic dive from $549/ aka $579.99 - that's a $230.00 smack down in short order- and we're told to think by people like you that's not enough, it needs to go lower...

I'm not thinking you've got much there fella, maybe the 10,20, or 30 bucks and officially move from $479 to $449 (of which 1 w rebate is already available at - the cheapo Powercolor as usual)

Just the EVGA 680 has sold more than the 7850 and 7870 combined at newegg.So despite 680 supply constraint, it is doing better than amd's entire 78xx lineup there. ROFL - now that's sadness for amd fansReply

if you can't afford it, it's your own fault. Every time I see a classless arrogant self entitled poster complaining about the pricing of all these new generations it makes me sick. There is a card in your price range, whatever your budget is. Just because they make expensive hardware doesn't mean it's for you, so why are you screaming about it constantly? I'm not screaming that I can't afford a 7 series BMW so don't embarass yourself. It makes you look foolish at best. People will agree with you because they are also in the throngs of life's underachievers who think they are entitled to a lifestyle they haven't worked for. If you really want it, save for it. I'm happy to pay for an ultra premium product that delivers an experience that I can say is truly enjoyable.

It's hilarious how people still keep using this argument: "If you can't afford it, don't complain about price." Many of us can afford the card. The main discussion at hand is that NV released a mid-range/upper mid-range line-up of chips that's a replacement for GTX560Ti and priced them at $400-500. Can you imagine if this was happening since GeForce 2 days, how much slower would the current cards be?

Even the reviewer noted that this is the least performance improvement from a new architecture + full node shrink in the history of NV. GTX670/680 are still good cards, but it doesn't change the fact that they aren't true flagship replacements for GTX480/580. Otherwise, AMD/NV will just launch 25-30% faster new generations every 18 months and we are supposed to eat it up for $500? Hopefully HD8000 and GTX780 will remedy the situation :)Reply

It seems as if many of the apologists willing to give AMD and Nvidia a pass on 28nm pricing are new to the GPU game, or tech toy game for that matter. They just have no historical perspective at all which I'm sure thrills the marketing/finance guys over in Silicon Valley....they can't sink their meathooks into these guys fast enough.

But yeah its not about being able to afford it, its about being able to buy them and actually feel good about the purchase looking back, a week, a month, a year from now. Most people only need to be burned once to learn their lesson, hopefully those early adopters who bought 7970/7950 and GTX 680/690 have learned theirs.Reply

I didn't want to spend 500$, but I did want something 2x as fast as my 5870. So the 680GTX got the bill.

But honestly I wouldn't expect cards to keep evolving at the same rate. Cards used more slots and more power to keep doubling and tripling in performance. That trend cannot go on for long because their is not enough slots and power to do so.

I fully expect all performance increases now to be from architecture improvements and node changes.Reply

You guys can claim anything you want with your bland, data absent talking point, so let's examine just how far out of sane bounds you two are ( you and chizow ) - and BTW I'd appreciate the reviewers talking point as well. A full quote will be fine.

Let's skip any insane retentiveness with fancy specific wording you've used as a ruse taken absolutely literally in the hopes that those not noticing a perfectly literal and absolutely strict translation would be fooled by the idea presented, and do a cursory examination:

We can start with the G80 - it morphed into the G92 and G92b which all you slam artists screamed was a rebranded absolute clone.

So we'll take the 9800GTX+ vs- the next released card, the GTX280.GTX280 morphed into GTX285We can move from the GTX285 to the GTX480 - the GTX480 morphed into the GTX580.So we move from GTX580 to GTX680.

Although I have not strictly gone insane talking point ruse literal and used a sort of CHEAT you people espouse with your lousy nm + new die move talking point, what I have is what people actually EXPERIENCED AS CARD RELEASES - so we'll have to go with those.

9800GTX+ to GTX280 (wow that gigantic upgrade )

GTX285 to GTX480 ( wow that gigantic upgrade )

GTX580 to GTX680 ( wow that gigantic upgrade )

Yes, you people are full of it. That's why you keep AVOIDING any real information and figured if you could spew on just the talking point, no one would have to notice what lying crap it is.Reply

Once again, your arguments are full of fail or you simply don't know how to read simple benchmarks. Using your own, flawed comparisons, you would see:

9800GTX+ to GTX280 (wow that gigantic upgrade) +70% OR MORE

GTX285 to GTX480 ( wow that gigantic upgrade ) +60% OR MORE

GTX580 to GTX680 ( wow that gigantic upgrade ) +30%......

The reason your comparison is flawed however is because you are comparing half-generations when you compare a refresh to a new generation, so the gap in both time and performance is diminished which decreases value for your $$$.

Correct comparisons are as follows, and when you look at it that way, GTX 680 and all other 28nm parts look EVEN worst in retrospect:

For shame for shame - more lies... no wonder you're yelling and you NEVER used benchmarks....Let's use anand's historical data !

And let's do it correctly. We go from the card we have now, to the card they release. People now have the GTX580 - and that's what they see in the charts as you whine, bitch and moan and spread your Charlie D FUD. Likewise in former tier jumps/releases.So we will use the TRUTH, not some anal retentive abject cheat worded just so, as you two fools suggest we should, to spin your lies ever more "in your favor".

Feel free to also compare to techpowerup or computerbase compilations to see similar results, since you obviously haven't been following the industry long enough to experience these revolutionary upgrades first-hand.

This is all common knowledge to GPU enthusiasts though, including the author of this article. Please update your frame of reference before you comment further. Thanks.Reply

Cherry picking is this very site and using the firswt bench at every release page CRYSIS your favorite amd game right now ?

Cherry picking when the SAME VENDOR CARD nVidia is used ?

Now nVidia is against itself in Crysis, and that's cherry picking ? I used the first game to actually look, because all we've has otherwise is you and your amd fanboys flapping lips... with ZERO evidence...

Now I'll look at your stupid link which is ZERO EVIDENCE for now since you cannot even be beyond lazy and copy a bit of text from it or claim what you think it proves.

LOL - so it proves nothing right ? You've got nothing. You have failed.Reply

" ince you obviously haven't been following the industry long enough to experience these revolutionary upgrades first-hand. "

Dude, I have been following daily for likely more years than your age.Good luck with that stupidity.80% and 75% is crap.

33% down to 20% or so is fine, but we have another problem - the GTX580 was an enormous movement in total as it was tacked on improved after the 480 and was just prior distorting your tiny moaning brain, as you add on your ten years blabbering talking point with your long time amd fanboyism to bolster it.

It took me a few minutes to prove you lied. :)

You've got a bit of a point, but not much, and the added features of this new nVidia release ( adaptive v-sync, frame rate target (precisionX) ) negates all of that anyway - not to mention the driver add going all the way back to the 8 series.

You're just moaning for no reason and lying too much while doing it.Reply

Here's a hole so large you'll be moaning when I'm done, and not about pricing or performance increase.

A lot of people may wait a couple generations to upgrade, or go from a top tier card 2 or 3 gen back to a secondary card now new - or vise versa, cross over the big two, etc. etc.

In your retentive and specialized moaning, you've restricted end user reality to a single specific instance you've handily outlined as your only metric, and have declared your single path to be the only qualifying upgrade doctrine to use. Now there's a zeal of rectal tightness one can easily surmise no end user gaming enthusiast has ever adhered to in their purchasing history, in the entire world, not once, ever.

So what we really have is a much varied user base in the card(s) they currently run, and a quite varied distane and jump, node, architecture, two cards to one, one card to two, using a current card as a PhysX boost for a hot and cheap upgrade, etc.

Thus, a person can wait out the $499 nVidia flagship launch or one or two, or some in between node shrink G80 to G92b, 280 to 285, 470 or 480 to 580, etc, and make the jump NOT when your choice choking and frankly stupid single choice only stroke my moaning firebrand demanded purchase scenario rears it's stupid dead head.

In other words, the $499 you complain about is not the second $499 the real gamer and end user customer spent, they've been sitting a round, and are only spending once, not on your miniscule upgrade single purchase own only before and after rant line....

So people figure it out in spite of your complaining, and make an enormous jump in their upgrade, or sell off a sli of cf set and barely spend a dime for a good "reset" for a future dual card perf bump on the cheap, or take the second or third or prior tier for a spin with a healthy discount from the release you hate with passion so much.

You see, you've become a one trick pony, the one trick an amd fanboy can rage about and pretend to have a point - now I wouldn't mind so much if your 75% and 80% crap wasn't so obviously a doubly inflated lie - but on the other hand the initial constraint you introduce is near worthless for any current end user your hoped for perfectly having a fit scenario would apply to !. -

NOTE: I'm so close to current performance because in the last ten years of those wonderful and enormous increases chizow has so adeptly been gassing the entire room about in hyper ventilation, that I think I'll keep my recently purchased flagship(s) that enjoyed not long ago that great and gigantic leap of power chizow loves in his tiny red heart so much ! Thanks chizow ! I can sit here a big fat winner with all my money in my pocket and it's such a poor increase I am win still for zero dollars !

Look in the mirror amd fanboy. I am sorry your amd fanboy base lifestyle took an upset this round, and you personally decided 7970 sucked compared to 680, and jumped from your 5870.

You obviously couldn't bring yourself to move to the small performance increase the just prior 6970 was, slapping chizow with that brick unconsciously, you attack me, the person who correctly outlined what actually occurs, that you actually did, by your own words, elsewhere more than once, in these posts.

ROFL - you really, really, really blew it badly that time Slynine.Reply

Exactly, I'm a lowly line cook for a large restaurant chain making $10/hr. But I have SAVED my pennies for this card and will be ordering one today. If an individual cannot reign in their expenses and put away a little here and there to buy what they want (and lets be honest, a 670 is a want NOT a NEED) then they should not be complaining. I'm nearly done acquiring parts for my first build and will be glad when it's done. One more "Summer if Ramen" is all I can do.Reply

Yes, too true for the ranters to respond to, and every gaming card is a want not a need.

The node shrinking is beginning to reach it's limit anyway - were getting down to not very many rows of molecules literally in between paths to buffer electrical disturbances inside the chips that are beginning to cause uncontainable tunneling damage.

28nm is at about a 51 atoms thick lattice, with 22mn , 16mn, and 14mn reaching down to so delicate an about 26 atom thick buffer aside electron flow that dual layering, "tri-gate" other K materials, or some quantum mechanics plasma containment breakthrough is soon needed.

Given that level of amazing sophistication, and a coming near limit on node shrink due to reaching into counting atoms on both hands and feet that make up "the thickness of the wire protection", perhaps the pricing complainers need a bit more humility and thankfulness, instead of a constant demand of moar and faster and better for less. Reply

That person never missed any point.You for one appear to be the delay artist. You run around moaning and bitching about prices, when in fact what you really want is others to purchase now so you can suck up the discounts at a later date reaping the future competition crunch and resultant price drops available because the early purchasers you attacked made it all possible. I don't have a problem with a person who bides their time and tries to score a deal when prices eventually drop. It does bother me though, when they go around forums biting the hand that is actually feeding them. Enjoy your dried up second or third tier penny pincher second class when you can finally afford it.Reply

At least in Germany it seems like the cheapest 7970 go for ~400€, and the same goes for GTX 670, so it's not so cut and dry win for the GTX 670 at least in Europe.

It's a great card from Nvidia, and sure to drop the current prices to more reasonable level. I almost feel like I should've waited, but then again, I've already played with my 7970 for five months, I suppose that could be worth the 100€ it has lost from its value so far.Reply

It's already clear the cores are maxxed out - so no future game will be bringing some 2G vs 3G gaming advantage with these cards. Trying to crank it up enough and hack in 50 high rez textures into Skyrim in order to cause a frame rate drop on the 680 is as ephemeral as stable amd drivers, and just doesn't happen. Common sense and the plain facts already make the answer absolutely clear to anyone who hasn't got a deranged mind scrubbed into fantasy by rampant fanboyism. If lack of personal experience is the problem, a hundred reviews already have solved the riddle - the answer is the cores cannot push more - they puke out before the memory does. "Enjoy" the "memory advantage" at "unplayable frame rates" and " 0 minimums" in a crawling, stuttering, frustrating "proof". I'm certain a thousand morons will join the crusade and like religious zealouts claim victory as blood shoots from their eyes and they fall down in epilelptic seizure from the blinking monitor and zero to fifteen fps frames. LOL A victory indeed.Reply

I've read and done benchmarks myself quite enough, thank you. I doubt there's going to be a bad bottleneck a year from now, and when 2 GB is not enough, a 7970 won't be enough either.

In any case I wasn't referring to 670 being a better card, I would still buy a 7970 (custom one) since I play at 5760x1080, where it's faster than 680 when overclocked. But if I had waited for this five months, I could've saved maybe 150€. Oh well, it's not like consumer electronics is ever a good investment...Reply

The talking point amd fanboys have a real problem. On their suddenly favorite gaming benchmark, Crysis warhead, the entire brand new line of cards is DEAD above 1920 in this very review.

They are all toast at 1920X1200 - nothing above will do, all that fancy 3G ram is absolutely zero @ 2560 in their mostest favorite 4 year old benchmark - and has full on competition at the only playable framerate in their one of two current wins, the second win - Metro2003 barely hanging on by a thread and on some reviews the 7970 loses it due to different eye candy settings- and let me not be so irresponsible as they and the reviewer are, and point out, the Metro2033 bench results in this very article leave the only playable resolution presented - yep you guessed it - 1920X1200, the lowest resolution presented.

Above that even the purported 7970 winner is absolute unplayable crap at 2560 - memory and all.

Now, that's the end of another important lesson, the core puke of the 7970 on both of the amd fanboys now instantly favorite games at the lowest of 3 resolutions presented, 3G ram worth absolutely nothing, less than nothing.

The immense blindness of the amd fanboys reaches the outer limits of the twilight zone. Reply

" We wanted to be able to run at the native resolution of 5760x1200 and compare the performance to the Radeon HD 7970. We figured if any resolution is going to show the advantages of AMD's memory capacity and memory bandwidth edge it would be 5760x1200. We were absolutely surprised that the GeForce GTX 680 had no trouble keeping pace with the Radeon HD 7970 at 5760x1200. We thought this is the resolution we might see the GTX 680 bottleneck, but to our surprise no bottlenecks were experienced. "

Sorry @ 5670X1080 even overclocked the 7970 loses, and often loses by a lot.

While the difference between 680 and 7970 stock isn't all that big even on 5760x1080, 7970 does OC and scale in games further than 680, and provides better min fps in situations where 680 memory bandwidth isn't up to snuff. But that's fairly irrelevant, since I can buy a 7970 for ~400€ while 680 is currently unavailable at ~500€.Reply

Not even in at page with your link, but I guess Tech Report is the only one you can't even quote, and we'll just rely on your stupid talking point with zero proof, heck your words do it - your words. ROFL.

No need to admire someone who is surrounded by so many liars. No need to defend nVidia, how about having one oyu lousy liars actually have even a shred of evidence ?

So far, none of you have it. Not that it matters, you're all amd fanboys anyway so facts don't matter.Reply

LOL - from your link " The 670 trails its big brother, the GeForce GTX 680, by only an eyelash in most of our performance results, closely enough that you'd have a very hard time telling the difference between them in everyday use. Not only that, but it delivers lower 99th percentile frame times than both the Radeon HD 7950 and the 7970 in three of our four game tests. Meanwhile, the 670's power consumption is quite tame.

If I were buying a video card right now for myself, I'd order up a GeForce GTX 670. You really can drive three two-megapixel displays with it and play games at reasonable frame rates, even though you'd want to go easier on the image quality options than we did. For those folks with a four-megapixel display or less, the 670 should deliver a nice dose of gaming nirvana. Now that the 670 is here, I fail to see the point of spending more on a GeForce GTX 680 or a Radeon HD 7970"

Let's talk about your type of rampant fanboyism - not a songel OC 7970 at yuor link for Tech Report - but you know what - here's a dual OC link 680 and 7970 OC, and in the chart they have a TIE 3/3 wins each, but we look further and in Batman, they excuse the amd since it can do PhysX, that makes it 4 to 3, and in TWS2, they have the amd card winning, because of the Gaming Evolved game patch that broke nVidia temporarily. That makes it 5 to2 in nVidia's favor.You get F1 2011, a game even I'd say amd wins in. You get SWTOR, and that's it.nVidia takes Skyrim, Wow, and Mass Effect 3, adding a +2 to their wins here in other games.

I a sorry, but you amd fanboys actually need to prove your endlessly spewed talking points, and none of you have, in fact you've been proven wrong time and again.Worse yet, you have big time driver problems, and bigger time lack of features, old, and now many new.

Yes, whatever, the 7970 has fallen to where it belongs, $100 less than the 680 - I haven't ignored that, I said go buy your fallen junk, but just don't spew out your lies about OC superior not ready to back it up.

Go get the loser card, no problem- just stop telling me it's better when it crashed to dingbat bin price as soon as the 680 stood up. There is a reason for that, one you refuse to acknowledge. You people obviously believe the laws of the market do not apply, and often stretch scientific reality to the outer realms as well.

Let us know if you have half your games fail if you ever do buy a card, which it appears by all the talk and no action yet, you are not going to anyway, so it's been fun watching the endless spinning from you nonetheless.Reply

Ryan Including a 670 OC in your benchmarks while not including HD 7950 OC when you have so many HD 7950 OC cards available in the market is not an objective and fair comparison. Given that HD 7950 OC editions are available at USD 399 those should have been included. HD 7950 scales beautifully with higher clock speeds. In your overclocking section there should be HD 7950 OC edition benchmarked at overclocks using AMD CCC. HD 7950 OC cards regularly hit 1050 Mhz in AMD CCC. I am confident the HD 7950 OC at 1050 Mhz will give the GTX 670 OC overclocked a run for its money. The fact that HD 7970s have been available from launch day at 1 Ghz speeds like XFX HD 7970 DD Black edition and that recently cards like MSI HD 7970 Lightning (1070 Mhz) and Powercolor PCS+ HD 7970 Vortex II (1100 Mhz) too have been available should be considered. The least you can do is include the 7970 OC cards and 680 OC cards to give a clear idea of the potential of these GPUs.After 4 months from HD 7970 launch I am yet to see a single HD 7970 OC edition review other than the XFX HD 7970 DD Black edition which was done on Jan 9, 2012. I can't speak for anyone but frankly it seems that there is bias towards Nvidia. In my opinion the HD 7970 and HD 7950 are good products and superior than GTX 680 / GTX 670 given its focus on gaming and compute. Also the Tahiti chip performance scales beautifully with OC and it has great OC headroom. I expected anandtech to do a better job at making a really fair and objective comparison.Reply

As a matter of policy we only include the OC results for the card(s) being reviewed in the article. The purpose of our OC testing is not to determine what overclocked card is faster, but rather to give you an idea of how far we could overclock the card being reviewed and what kind of performance it can achieve.

We do not review overclocked cards in the manner you suggest because that's one lucky/unlucky card away from having significantly different results (just look at our memory overclocks). GPU overclocking is unreliable and should be considered a nice extra at best; it should not be used as the basis to choose between different GPUs.

The least anandtech can do is have separate HD 7950 OC vs GTX 670 OC cards and 680 OC vs HD 7970 OC cards head to head comparison reviews.The fastest OC models in the market for both cards can be choosen and benched both at stock and overclocked. Such reviews would give a clear idea of the potential of the GPUs. Reply

Look at the benchmarks where GTX670 OC wins. The lead is so dramatic, even if you overclock HD7950 by 40-50%, it still won't win. And that's assuming perfect 40% scaling with a 40% overclock which won't happen on the 7950.

Of course hardly anyone would buy a card for the same price that requires overclocking lottery of 50% just to match a reference overclocked 670, not to mention the 7950 would consume 100W+ more power in the process. 7950 is no longer relevant at $399. It needs to drop to $349 at most. Also, some $420-430 after market 670s already hit 1300-1400mhz in GPU Boost which would easily go head to head with a 1250mhz 7970. HD7950 has no chance. Reply

I look at the most demanding games at maximum image quality settings which are doing less than 60+ fps at 2560 x 1600 cause those are the games that really stress the GPU . BF3 , Alan Wake, Crysis 2, The Witcher 2, Total War Shogun 2, Anno 2070, Batman Arkham City fall in that list. Above 60 fps its not going to make a difference unless you are in a multiplayer competition. A HD 7970 at 1250 Mhz will beat or tie a 680 OC at 1350 Mhz in each of these games. Wanna bet Reply

HH benchies say they're just about even at 5760x1080 (6.2Mp), even when the AMD card has the higher clocks. Nvidia won every test at the lower resolution of 1080p (2.1Mp). It's a bit hard to infer performance at 1600p (4Mp) but I'm guessing they should be nearly even.

Where can you find a 670 at 1300 -1400 mhz overclock. I think maybe you are reading the cuda cores at 1344 since they are just below the core and boost clocks (on newegg at least). Sorry if I'm wrong but the highest I saw was 1006 core and 1058 mhz boost for the galaxy at 439.99Reply

I've mentioned this is in a few article comments now, but I'm wondering if the new OpenCL accelerated WinZip 16.5 would make a good compute benchmark? (No I don't work for WinZip). I'm assuming AMD's involvement in the development didn't result in a vendor specific OpenCL program. Seeing file compression/decompression is such a common use case, this could become a broad consumer use of GPGPU.

BTW, Intel has released beta Windows 8 drivers (v1729) which in fact work with Windows 7 and add full OpenGL 4.0 and OpenCL 1.1 support for Ivy Bridge. It would be great to run relevant OpenCL compute benchmarks as well as Unigine Heaven OpenGL tessellation to see how Ivy Bridge compares to Llano and discrete low/mid-range GPUs. Reply

Yet u used a benchmark that only supports nVidia cards in the article, doesn't change the fact the 670 is a great card, but your reply doesn't add up. And why are games like stalker and alan wake not including?Reply

I see. I couldn't actually confirm that myself since I don't currently have a nVidia GPU. It's disappointing that after all the complaints about vendor specific APIs, namely CUDA, and talking up OpenCL as the ideal cross-vendor, cross-platform approach to GPGPU, AMD then turns around and helps develop a vendor specific OpenCL program.Reply

As I've said, they've been lying to their insane fanboy contingent for quite some time. The 3G of ram goes right along this line, it adds zero performance, it actually slows the cards down, but fanboys can have a field day with their insane speculations and cockeyed illusions. AMD cried for years against cuda and physx, leaving their fanboys grinding their teeth and cursing nVidia in the dark - destitute and uncovered, while they arguably lost less money playing that raging fanboy PR game, they blew their cover with the 7970 rape price launch, and now their proprietary whoring with winzip. They are EVIL - as in not practicing what they preach and achieving one hundred percent hypocrisy - and only the fanboys haven't known that for years - and now, their eyes should finally be opened, but frankly, I doubt a mack truck 45mph over the speed limit on grooved concrete could open those thick craniums. Bottom line - amd business practices are evil and they suck - and their drivers suck too.Reply

Yes, and since nVidia didn't f*ck off with their proprietary tactics after repeated requests to stop, AMD did what they had to. If you're going to whine about that, you're being completely unreasonable.Reply

No, I'm not whining about it. I don't mind at all. If nVidia wants to have a fast winzip, they will have to pay up and or do the hard driver and collusion work.

Pretty simple. Very fair. Something amd decided it did not want to do for many years - as it and you people whined in hatred toward nVidia for years.

All I've done is point out what you should have known for years already, amd does the same thing all the time and "worse". But to understand and know that, you'd have to have a mind and be an adult, not a brainwashed fanboy.Reply

Bullcrap, sir.We all know Tahiti with it's unblocked FP totally wipes the floor with even the best Tesla out there.

The benchmarks you picked fail to show that, because too many are CUDA, which is obviously not the future of GPGPU since the ARM crowd and google have gone OPENCL.

As a summary, the usual Anandtech paid advertisement fails to deliver on the tech front but who cares, you and so many others already have a million nerds salivating at the thought of nvidia (this round, cuz I'm sure you'll get a call from AMD one of these days).Reply

Now all you need is software - and an arm cellphone ? Or maybe a tablet with Tahiti in it ? ROFL Have fun, enjoy your winzip !By the way nice total 180 reverse turnaround since the just prior three in a row utter compute fail amd generations. Better get coding !Reply

Nvidia has some nice cards out in the 670/680 now but damn.. these paper launches are fairly frustrating. It's not so much the fact that their flying off the shelves but rather they haven't made it there yet. Reply

much less, since those are all failed 680's -the full gk104 at the specs nvidia picked for 680 (1.1 Ghz turbo, 200 watts) aren't going to reach mass volumes before a few months, and before then nVidia will have much more expensive silicon they wanna sell, namely 110 tesla pro stuff - which does require much better yields though since it's a huge die with important TDP limitations.Reply

Your idea, and frankly every other morons out there for the last number of years that the exact single unit needing to be disabled in a lesser release is the part of the gpu die that magically fails in production and allows it to be released at a lower tier is the most enormous brainfart one can ever hope for, with full head explosion from the immense pressure before the fact. I simply do not understand why people are so stupid, and so willing to show everyone else that they in fact, are. Don't repeat the talking points man. They are not true.Reply

You just blew your own point. AMD cpu's are no exception either - as about 50% of the dual core phenom 2's (according to this sites reviewers) successfully unlock into stable quadcores (another large percentage is user error, bios issue, meme incomatibility,etc) - so just CUTTING OFF default on states is not " a failed core" as you so stupidly state. Further, we can use your junk mentality about cores to comment on the recent 6950 - which unlocked - apparently their junk cores are junk wasted wasted crap binned down to 6950 because they sucked so badly they couldn't make themselves into being a 6970, right ? NO, you are not correct.I added a couple of amd examples because I noted your ongoing amd fanboyism, so hope to have jolted you from your spewing idiotic FUD with a few thoughts of your favorite little red friends... Here with the 680 "cut" into a 670 we have a very SMALL percentage of the core becoming not used, hence the chance that it "just happens to be a failed core that couldn't make the 680 grade" is VERY MINISCULE indeed. The vast majority are just "cut" for the 670, perhaps every single one, since we see they require a high clock and even overclock better than 680's generally and therefore are from a likely refined and tweaked process. I certainly wish you fanboys wouls stop spreading stupid put down lies, and then of course, only using them against your hated competition. There is a BIG DIFFERENCE between disabling two of four cores as amd did in so, so many amd cpus - giving them a chance to use a part that is near a full 50% piece of die failure crap (ROFL) - and ...

Disabling one tiny of 8 functional shaders, leaving 7 of 8 useful, and likely in that case, having all 8 useful and just cutting the access.

Given amd's 50 cpu core hacking cutoffs, "failed dies" may in fact apply to that, but NOT to the 670, except by very rare chance indeed.Reply

The GTX680 has been selling just about every day on the egg - the verified reviewers trickle in daily. So, what initially is a zero to the clueless zero who doesn't count not only amazon stock and tiger direct stock but about 50 other online and famous vendors and only looks at just newegg or worse yet just repeats a lie they heard because they liked the sound of it, is not really a zero but a trickle. Let us know if it goes much past the 2.5 month trickle of the 79xx series, and then add in an extra 2 weeks because of the absolutely pathetic amd lack of decent driver situation that is ongoing.... Yes I'll give nVidia 3 or 4 months since those that are being bought slowly in the opressed US economy at least have all their games working at first and SLI working and even STW2 works - not to mention the added features of target frame rate (use evga precision X) and adaptive v-sync in driver 301.24 out for some time now for ALL nVidia cards all the way back to the hated and dreaded by amd fanboys massively re-released and branded "rebrand" G80 or 8 series GPU's. You may send nVidia a big thank you email for providing massive ongoing value for their entire user base with awesome driver updating, absolutely AWESOME.Reply

You are out of your mind. In fact AMD's competitiveness in the most demanding games has increased. AMD's 4XAA / 8X AA performance in Batman Arkham city has been fixed with the latest drivers.In fact in Batman Arkham city at 8X AA AMD is now faster . check other websites like legitreviews. In Shogun 2 Nvidia's performance has been hit severely due to the latest patch / driver situation and its clearly behind HD 7970 at 2560 x 1600 and 5760 x 1080. In the most demanding games like BF3, Alan Wake, Crysis 2, Batman Arkham City, The Witcher 2, Shogun 2, Anno 2070, the HD 7970 will easily defeat the GTX 680 given that HD 7970 1Ghz - 1.1 Ghz ( Sapphire HD 7970 Dual X, MSI HD 7970 Lightning (1070) , Powercolor PCS+ HD 7970 Vortex II (1100) ) is available in retail. And not to forget the beautiful performance scaling of the HD 7970. Most users are running the HD 7970 OC editions at 1150 Mhz on stock voltage. Some are pushing it to 1250 with extra voltage. The HD 7970 is a true single GPU beast with the raw power, memory bandwidth and size to handle the most demanding games of today and tomorrow.Reply

"For benchmark testing of Batman: Arkham City we disabled PhysX to keep it fair and ran the game in DirectX 11 mode with 8x MSAA enabled and all the image quality features cranked up. You can see all of the exact settings in the screen captures above. "

In the most demanding games the HD 7970 shows its raw power. Whats the point in looking at games doing 100 fps. its for suckers like you who don't think at all. Unless you are into multiplayer combat once you cross 60+ fps it doesn't make any difference in normal gaming. scenarios.Reply

In a single cherry picked instance after a year of amd driver failure, and likely a current cheat with driver chumming, the amd card has magically tweaked out a long lose into a single win - and suddenly you forgot the months on end we all suffered with our overpriced 7970 crapster crashing on every other game randomly. Way to go with pr fanboy passion.Now see this http://translate.google.pl/translate?hl=pl&sl=...

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted for a single game. Just remember don't turn up the tesselation, make sure to tweak the tesselation cheater slider in amd's CCC bloated ad serving pig, then keep the head held high as the random crash and hours of reinstalling and fixing the newly discovered bugs from the latest driver keep you occupied. No PhysX, they turned it off in your proof game because amd can't hang. ROFL I amd and I can't play, crip the game so I can win, because I can't play with the eye candy turned on.Reply

Then of course almost everyone now recommends 680 in case of going to SLI in the future, because it's so much better than CF, including the reviewer above - so much more important than...

imaginary future 3G never coming lifetime for a single outside the box explicitly setup and tweaked for amd benchmark with just the right settings and game and endless hours searching for the combo to show a single instance... (I guess a couple years of amd fanboys whacking away might find a big lie they can hope to offer)Reply

I think some are missing the point here.. Don't matter right now, AMD or Nvidia both camps have excellent options. I know I'd trade my 6950 and 570s for either in a heart beat and throw in some cash as well..

The only thing I can really find as a sticking point is price.. and while AMD may drop prices a little on the 7950 with the amount of ram it has and it's memory bandwidth I don't think it's going to get to the $300 mark. Maybe $350 though..Reply

Let's be honest, now with the GTX670 at $399 and available, the 7950 is a bad and hurtful joke, and the 7970 @ $479.99 w games is a joke too. Buy the game you want and the 670, forget the piece of crap amd cannot supply drivers properly for and in fact is a whomped loser in features, power, perf, triple monitor, monitor CONNECTIONS (not mentioned yet in this whole bloggery another nVidia advantage of the so many and too numerous to recall all at once)...

It's just a sad day for amd fanboys - it's a total stompage - I would be weeping and asleep if I were an amd fanboy - totally crushed, in need of verdetrol...

That's quite the OC on their 4th amd 7970 sample - 1.35 volts, 1280 core and 7,455 memory - a quite unusual and generally on average unattainable, and unsustainable OC - run that puppy for a while and expect a quick burnout and housefire - not to mention the gigantic electric bill amd cost you. Then you'll want a free replacement for your fried $579 double X brastrap amd card, a free one..."no of course it wwasn't OC mr rma, I dunno what happened!?" ---- Shady edge card destroying non 24/7 OC's don't count, not really. I wouldn't mind maybe 1050 or 1100 on the core, something one could expect to be sustained on flaky amd drivers with extra random dropout reboots multiple times daily...Reply

4th fastest card, eh? Have a look at these benchmarks, that actually show what the 7970 is capable of if it's OC'd to 1250MHz on the core (1870MHz memory) -- something most 7970s will do, and very few websites have been showing. To be fair, they also OC'd the GTX670 pretty much as far as it would go, too, 1330MHz on the core (1542MHz memory).

At 1080p, a resolution the GTX680/GTX670 cards often do better in than 2560x1920 or higher. The 7970 wins handily on all but one benchmark (Heaven), and it's only very slightly behind on that one.

I think all AMD has to do is release 1200MHz versions of the 7970 and maybe 1050MHz versions of the 7950 and price them at about ~$400 (you can already buy 7970s for ~$450 right now) and $350 respectively. That should take quite a bit of the wind out of nVidia's sails.Reply

Average air OC on 7970 is 1,204 and average memory overclock is no where near 7,480 up from the stock 5,500

You've got a look at a golden sample there bub, and NO ONE is going to run that sustained clock in 24/7 gaming without some very expensive water cooling or the like and a really good warranty since burnout is likely.Reply

In the GTX 670 review the HD 7970 has improved its performance greatly while the HD 7950 has not moved a bit. This has got to be a mistake. AMD's latest 12.4 Catalyst drivers have improved 4XAA, 8XAA performance significantly. Please make the corrections.Reply

Perhaps he doesn't have a 7950 on hand to do that with? Anyway.. I think there is alot of untapped potential with the 7X top end cards that can only be improved upon down the road with future updates to drivers.Reply

Uh... we can't test that, because amd can't do that, and amd stutters and crap with v-sync, and that would be an opressed amd card unfairly discriminated against if we did try that adaptive v-sync that ups the minimum frame rate of the nVidia card, heightens the overall frame rate, and smooths out the game. We do affirmative action here for amd.

Just wanted to say thanks for including the 5870 on most of the review graphs. I've got one and it's really nice to see if the upgrade is worth it. Not that I can decide, but it's nice to have the numbers anyway! :)Reply

I upgraded to a 680GTX from 5870. The times that the 5870 struggled most is when this card is the biggest improvement.

Cyrsis 2 when the walker shoots that bright light thing. That killed my 5870, like 5-10fps (DX 9, highest settings at release). But the 680GTX is around 30 FPS with much much higher settings. ( DX11, high res texture pack) Its def 2x the performance and more. When the performance dived on the 5870 seems to be where this card is more like 3x faster and more consistent.Reply

I don't see the point in even getting the 680 GTX. Both nvidia and AMD show a good improvement in their flagship over their best last gen card of about 30-40%. Other than that, I can't help but feel underwhelmed with the current $250 and $350 range cards as they are just merely more power efficient (which is great), but with maybe 5% or so better performance. Hopefully we see better midrange to upper midrange cards in the near future as I don't want to spend anymore than $350, preferably $300-$325. AMD is just looking really bad this round. The only props I can give them is that they made a good gaming and compute card at the same time. Unfortunately, I feel that most gamers will not care too much for compute. It'll depend mainly on if games will become more compute heavy like metro 2033 or Crysis, but I highly doubt it as most games are consolized and with even the next gen consoles, pc games will still be a bit held back by the next gen consoles. Reply

I can't help but be surprised by how unintelligent your comments are. Look at the most demanding games released in the last 12 months - BF3, Alan Wake, Crysis 2, Batman Arkham City, The Witcher 2, Shogun 2 Total War, Anno 2070. Are you able to max out these games at 2560 x 1600 and get 60 fps. No you can't. I can bet the HD 7970 will win or tie each one of these games with the GTX 680 OC especially looking at HD 7970 OC editions available at upto 1.1 Ghz with headroom upto 1300 Mhz with voltage OC.What happens when games like Crysis 3 and Metro Last Light release in 2013. They will be hard to max out at 1080p. So please don't make such stupid statements. PC gaming is about gaming at maximum image quality at ultra high resolutions and in factlast but not the least multi monitor gaming. Also the PS4 and Xbox Next are to be launched in 2013 so the graphics quality of games will improve significantly. Reply

dude please stop it.we get it, your an amd fanboy that had his feelings hurt when the gpu from his favourite manufacturer loses the race.

Don't give one website or one review as evidence. Taken as a whole and across many reviews, most put the 680 on top as fastest card available stock for stock. ( for gaming, compute is a different story)

start talking OC'ed editions and there won't be consistent comparisons as it's dependent on 3rd party PCB's and coolers. no doubt there will be nicely overclocked cards from both camps, but the most relevant comparison is the one done at stock speeds.Reply

this is escapist tendency. People running 1150 Mhz on HD 7970 OC editions at stock voltage are on the forums. i have got their feedback. In fact others who have pushed to 1250 with extra voltage have said the scaling is phenomenal. So if you know the facts then speak. At USD 500 you are talking about the high end of the market where people go for maximum performance with stock voltage OC or maximum voltage OC and some even modify their cards with watercooling. Websites will say what they have to. Its upto you to deduce the real potential and value. Then there is the availability question. All this comparison is irrelevant if you are talking about a product like GTX 680 which 6 weeks after launch is difficult to find. Don't give me the crap that its only extraordinary demand and not a supply problem. I am not hurt at all. In fact I have had Nvidia 7950 GT before my current HD 6950. What pisses me off is the constant 925 Mhz stock comparisons raised by Nvidia fanbois when there are cards like MSI HD 7970 Lightning (1070 Mhz) and Powercolor HD 7970 Vortex II (1100 Mhz). Reply

i just ordered a GTX 680, just sold my 2 year old Radeon HD5850 for 120$I must say, GTX 680 is the best buy for your buck right now.Only 1 shop had it on stock in Denmark, it` s selling out as soon as it shows up, so i guess there are plenty of enthusiasts out there..:)I had to add this to my X79 Asus board with the 6 cores I7 and 32 Gb ram..and connected to my two 27 inches dell monitors running at 2560 x 1440..Now i can play the best games and make music production, all in one workstation..I` m not a Nvidia fan, was on Amd` s side, also back in time when they use to make good processors, but since then I moved to Intel cores, and now to Nvidia.Gotta be impartial when it comes to hardware.:)Reply

Here rag, have a looksie, and this time I will translate the chart, but before that imagine the hundreds of thousands on angry nVidia fans who have had to look at YEARS of charts with the GTX570 732 stock core (914 average air OC hwbot) put up against the 6850 or 6970 and now the 7850 and 7870 with much higher stock core clocks...

So your complaint, if you call it valid, applies to the last THREE nVidia generations... at the very least, and can we say, given the same standard you claim is needed, nVidia was SCREWED for years on end here... ?

YES WE CAN.

Now how about some truth when it comes to "at the same clockspeed" ? There's the link.

"PC gaming is about gaming at maximum image quality at ultra high resolutions and in fact last but not the least multi monitor gaming"

hmmm, so PC gaming is basically a 10x costlier console? why do i occasionally like to play a game on my PC, and am rather successful at having fun with it, when i didn't payed 2000$ for it? guess cause i'm unintelligent... oh, ultra high resolution is a nice thing to have, but maximum image quality - often i fail to see any difference, except in framerate, and the faster paced the game is, quality difference is harder to spot, opposite to framerate drops

"Also the PS4 and Xbox Next are to be launched in 2013 so the graphics quality of games will improve significantly."

you are aware that all three new gaming consoles will be based on medium-range AMD cards, aren't you? and still expect that graphics quality will increase significantly? both AMD and NVIDIA are likely to have another generation of cards launched by then...Reply

You want a good example. Alan Wake on Xbox 360 and Alan Wake on PC at 2560 x 1600 maxed out. Try the difference. I have played Alan Wake on PC at 1080p maxed out. I can say it was fantastic. I have seen the Xbox 360 versions on youtube. The quality is much better on the PC. Its just not just texture quality, anti aliasing but even lighting and visual effects like god rays. I can say that BF3 would similarly look much better on the PC maxed out in DX11 at 2560 x 1600. If you prefer to cheap out and go for the console its fine. But the PC is the ultimate gaming platform. Reply

good luck with that system on ultra settings in highest resolution (which is, btw, NOT 1920x1080). one can argue with about every item you listed - but lets just say this:

what if i DON'T have a console and cannot reuse that "$500 big screen"?

and you honestly think i value you so much that i actually make a calculation of current hardware prices just to contradict you? you're so wrong... but your "gaming configuration" did made me laugh on several occasions

7x, 8x, 9x, 10x - what's ESSENTIAL difference? point is still valid, and will be as long as we don't go into 2-3x range

@raghu78

i cannot say i saw Alan Wake on any platform, but xbox360 is 2010? and PC version is 2012? i fail to see significance in comparing them...

what i DID say is that it's often hard to notice difference between highest and next-highest level of settings - might be subjective and/or game-dependent - ones i saw didn't make me feel compelled to switch GPU. again, it can be just me

i would also prefer you not to put words in my mouth, i never had and probably never will buy a game consoleReply

Ok, so 1920x1080 is better than consolers, or at least equal to, their TV resolution, so the point is still valid, the point I made, not your exaggerated 10X. A carefully built $600 gaming system can look far superior to a console. Now, after you blurted out the price blabber, I added your two comments together and understand where you're coming from.

You like a low or medium PC game setup and you really could care less for quality, just fast frames.

The system I posted whallops any console, period. It smokes it into the dirt. Keep laughing then, as your stupid comment about gaming at 10X the cost is stupid because you claimed you can't tell the difference and even if you could you wouldn't and don't care.

So you just keep your non console no eye candy occasional game rig and be happy. Whatever.Reply

"So you just keep your non console no eye candy occasional game rig and be happy."

oh, thank you very much for allowing me to do this :)

for your information, i am building systems (gaming or otherwise, all price ranges) for many, many years and am in fact quite good at it... your proposed configuration is quite laughable (high-end gamer with 25$ mouse+keyboard)...

please post more configurations, i might learn something :) - someone with so much posts must me exceedingly intelligent and experienced

i don't deal with consoles, and if you failed to comprehendmeaning of "2013 consoles will have mid-range 2012 graphics)" in the light of "overall increase of game graphics quality" (last one not said by me, btw)... well, it's totally not my problem...

btw, you should ask for professional help, both in system building and anger-management - someone raging so much at every hardware review/comment have definite issues

oh, i currently have 5 systems, some of them with AMD and some with NVIDIA graphics (of different price-ranges), NOT because i'm very rich, but because i need them for work. but objectivity is not something you would understand, is it?Reply

Objectivity and communication skills is not something you have, that's for sure. Nor do you have honesty. You certainly, I guarantee, have not built more systems for others than I have, and haven't owned retail, besides that. None of that matters, as your posts alone should be proof of your capabilities, as they are the only evidence any of us here have.

So let's talk about understanding - understand this, there isn't a thing you could teach me, and so far, I've caught you lying. If you actually have a point, or rather had one, I already told you it became clear after your second post - and it's still as clear as it was then.

Now let's go back to 10X more expensive - a console is easily or generally $299, some $599, so let's go with $499, then we have the $500 TV set, and we're at $1,000 for console - Now at your 10X rate, we have $10,000 for a top end gaming system. Congratulations, you're a great teacher.

Like I said I got it - you dissed consoles, and you dissed decent high end gaming rigs, you like dissing, you started out dissing, and ended with dissing, and as far as facts in between, there were none.Reply

"You certainly, I guarantee, have not built more systems for others than I have, and haven't owned retail, besides that."

getting personal, aren't we? you are building system for OTHERS (unlucky people)? i do it for living, quite successfully and for many years... you have no way of knowing how many i made, yet claim your own superiority...

as facts are concerned you're turning a figure of speech into your chief argument - what did you expect from me, to browse current console prices and say it's 7.14x times more expensive (feel free to use this number as a further proof, it could improve your calculating abilities). oh, by the way, including monitor/tv into 10x calculation is a stunningly clever - what the hell would anyone do with ten 500$ screens? or i have missed well-known fact that consoles are sold EXCLUSIVELY packed with 500$ screen - in which case i do apologize to you..

and if you had any communication skill, everyone wouldn't hate you - i browsed several random replies people posted on your so called "fact-based comments" and none were positive. however all of them had more or less clear evidence of your incompetence Reply

Oh cut the crap. You haven't provided a rudimentary price structure to even get close to 7.14X and you NEVER will.

You're like chizow the flaming red hater, who screamed 80% and 75% perf increases vs 40% current when finally after ten demands he had to reply with something, and it was like you, his "word", then "his demand" I "look around at benches" and get a clue - so I posted the links from anandf flagship releases and the numbers, and found 33% to be a fair number not 80%.

My competence is far above yours because I'm not a knee jerk liar, and I can actually be a man about things and go where the evidence leads, and ignore the hyper emo fanboy lies that well up from within - something about 90% of you need a lot of training in to overcome.

Since you blew out your big lying spew, you'll have to come clean to gain any shred of respect, and it is clear you have no intention to do so.Reply

No chizow never had any facts, and you know it.AFTER I took the time to post all the links on the RELEASE reviews of the very cards from anantech over the years here, AND post the frames for the easy comparison... WHICH HE NEVER DID ONCE WITH ANY DATA AT ALL....

chizow then finally by way of not so lazy and lying as to be laughable, did what I told him to do prior, GO LOOK AT THE BENCH chart here at anand and then give us the real percentages, not his lies he just prior got caught on.

So he posted one link on one game (with what systems behind them we have no clue like we do in the REVIEW links I posted ).

Now after having your lies exposed with chizows, your absolute lack of data, and my work, you're still whining.

I used the very first game in each review, Crysis, and it's all nVidia cards bud. That'sa not cherry picking anything, I even used the release review from anandtech because that's what were using and the EXACT SAME LOOK we are all having here.

Great cards. The great battles are only in the forums though, in reality sales happen under the $200 mark...I see only AMD 7850 and NVidia 560ti where the actual money is made. So, yeah NVidia is still behind its competition on new releases in the money making segments.Applause to green team though, their architecture and mnf process are so good, they managed to offer the GT560 replacement as an higher tier card with double the price :):)Have said so, I will consider these when they hit the $199 mark...Reply

The amd 7850 is getting beaten in sales by the low supply GTX680 - not only that - add in the 7870 and it's still getting beaten in sales. What you see "on the amd 7870 and 7850" is FAIL.Now, I will go to NewEgg and CHECK the 560Ti sales, which my guess now is they are actually more than the GTX680, which beats the 7870 and 7850 sales combined...---Yes, the 560Ti wins against 7850 by a MASSIVE amount of sales. amd is failing, or pick some other cards from amd, because 7870 and 7850 are really sucking for sales.Reply

How are you exactly going to CHECK the sales? Because, you know, I am using distributors' and retailers' sales out data, and I can tell you that sales action is in the $200 and lower tier, where NVidia has nothing new yet.NVidia makes A LOT of money in the HPC market, this is their major focus now, hence we wait to see the GF110. But that will be pro card with a pro price, and no consumer application.So yeah, I expect prices of consumer GPUs to keep going down, because now there are no products where the volume sales is.Reply

The gtx560 is already below $199, not sure where you've been for a long time. After you name one in the price tier, you claim there are none in the price tier, and you left out the entire 460 line up as well, just to name another quite easily.You already have an answer to your other question and your credibility is zero in any case.

" in reality sales happen under the $200 mark...I see only AMD 7850 and NVidia 560ti where the actual money is made "

The 7850 is $250+, and it's not selling. You're another clueless person who repeats talking points they heard from someone else, and of course you heard the pro card talking point from me earlier in the thread.

I am certain that this point is very irrelevant to an enthusiast's frame of mind, but based on personal experience, AMD cards live longer. GeForce cards just stop being useful after a while. It has always been the case, ever since early ati cards. AMD gives a playable frame rate, while GeForce just gets stuck. And another point that I am not going to insist upon is that with NVIDIA cards I always get the feeling that a few frames are skipped on random, but it is done in such a smart way that the game play is not hindered, nonetheless it is always there.

Anyway, 7970 is a superior product over 680 if only for the compute performance it offers. You are really not missing much losing 5 frames per second at ultra high settings, which at best estimates only 5% of users have the required hardware for, and super frame rates, but the almost 100% gain in compute performance is nothing that those who need compute power can ignore, and there is more of them each day. Accordingly, AMD can sell a lot of GPUs at current prices and if inclined can trounce NVIDIA if it chooses to lower the prices on the strength of its sales.Reply

I disagree.. Cards live longer based upon cooling designs and overclocks. In my experience cheap low end cards don't last all that long, Nor do some of the overclocked products.. and it don't matter Amd/Nvidia .. it's all the same. Depends on what the partners do with the chips is all.Reply

In my experience with electronics, the most likely to malfunction thing is the bearing of the fan, regardless of the price of the GPU card...Hence, it is sad to pay $500 for something that in reality should've been $200, and will eventually crap out within 2-3 years anyway.

I work for such a company, I live across AMD campus, all my friends are in the semiconductor business, including at NVidia, etc...so a lot of experience/ Reply

Clean the dust, dismount the fan, clean the shaft (by pulling the little white split plastic retaining and shoving the fan out of the armature bearing) - clean the thick black grime, add a drop or two of $1.29 motor 3 in 1 walmart available oil, and put her back together. There's another 3 years of running, silent bearing and like new.Crapping out means you forgot to clean the radiator and change the oil - so burning out a $25,000.00 brand new overpriced car is just as easy.Reply

I don't like all you people who wind up killing so many cards that you go off on an insane tangent about this or that card companies cards crapping out. You're the reason we have to pay for two freaking cards when we're buying one - because a bunch of knotheads like you destroy cards and then turn them in for a replacement, driving up all our costs to near double what they should be. I further cannot stand the endless number of persons who squirm and squiggle demanding someone on the other end of the phone for "tech support" and instant turn around after destroying the cards they've bought with their own stupidity. I have two close friends, one always destroys amd cards, and the other always destroys nVidia cards. I'll fire up several functioning Voodoo2 cards and ati mach 64's right now - along with an endless stream of both in between, stll functioning, including many agp models. If you overclock your card, forget to turn the fan to 100%, crank up the voltage, fire up furmark, then jam the dang thing into extreme burn mode, and red eye pass out drooling on the desk, don't expect anything but a burned out card when you wake up your hangover kicks in. It's not that hard to figure out.Reply

Sorry guys, but I do not mean the fan not working anymore or overclock burnout. I am not a fan of overclocking the GPU at all. The gains are not worth the trouble. At best is like overclocking the memory which at best give you a 5% advantage overall. I am talking about the chip. I said that GeForce cards get stuck. That does not mean that it has burned or that the fan is gone.

Yeah, go ahead and fire up old cards. NVIDIA cards do play the games that were out when the card came out, but not the games that came out three years after. Not the case with AMD cards. AMD (ati) card still start the game, and play, with lower frame rates.

I said that I have always had the feeling that GeForce cards skip frames, and I still do. Is there a way to count for frames that should be there and are not?Reply

The problem is, it's "your feeling", instead of reality.NVidia drivers often increase frame rates for older nVidia cards and often add features prior unavailable to those same cards. I've seen it since the first nVidia Ti series, which had some awesome driver upgrades even back then, that allowed them to play games they couldn't properly render since they were so old by the time games came out. Now for instance, let me give you a modern example.I just recently installed and played BF3 on an nVidia 9500 just for kicks.It was 12-15 fps about on one of the extra core 2 systems.---Your "frame skip" feeling is just that, your fanboy feeling, and not reality.+Another example is the 7600gs SLI - that plays everything there currently is that I tried on it ( just goofing around) - not only that, but the SLI ran flawlessly in XP, win7 32 and win 7 64 bit.+All 8 series nvidia + cards are still valid from all my experience, and some 7 series.---Count frames ? Count it with fraps.Reply

Hey, what is your problem. I acknowledged general better frame rates of 680 over 7970 up front. And I am not talking about SLI setups either. It is single card performance which AMD delivers superior to NVIDIA over the years. Yes, NVIDIA has a way with video game engine makers. It has been like that for as long as anyone can remember.

I said I am not going to insisting on NVIDIA skipping frames, but I am going to insist that you read the post correctly. Skipping frames is different from frame rate. A card can render as many frames as it likes and skip as many as it likes. A card that renders all frames is the honest one, while the card that skips is the frame rate can be the frame rate champ.

I am not a fanboy of anything. However, since you are so keen on numbers, AMD is the king of compute which is by far more important at this point in the evolution of the GPU than the few extra frames that NVIDIA can churn out. AMD should definitely keep a hefty price premium over NVIDIA cards for that reason alone. In other words it is up to NVIDIA how low it wants to go.Reply

Go to Tech Report, they do a render time count on frames, which indicates according to theory, which cards offer "smooth" frame rates in which games. Your "feeling" might have something to do with that, although by your last post I'll go even more with amd fanboy for you now, than I had thought before. If "smoothness" is your problem, and hence you "feel" nVidia is cheating, you perhaps should get the 301.24 driver and then use it's CP adaptive v-sync ( on non 6000 cards back to 8 series) or less so possibly the prefer full power setting. Beyond that use the EVGA precision frame rate target. On the other hand, you think nVidia is cheating, so don't do any of the above and go with that thought. I'm sure no one has discovered nVidia skipping frames (roll eyes)

Furthermore, there is a new tech designed by the Israeli company called LucidLogix for z68 sandy bridge boards that allows one to use their discrete GPU card in conjunction with the onboard SB gpu core (HD3000) outputting the frames, and it uses an algorithm software and a certain cache/computing portion of the SB gpu to eliminate extra frames and parts of frames that would not be fully rendered and be cut off by the refresh rate - reducing or eliminating tearing for instance in frame rates higher than the monitors resolution - It COUNTS frames it throws away - resulting in a higher on screen FPS score, smoother gameplay, and a higher frame rate overall, although not as high as it's counter claims. So THAT would be something akin to your suspicious amd fanboy complaint, but it works on amd and nvidia alike.

That would be very nice, BTW, if amd "kept" a hefty price premium over nVidia, but first they'd have to currently be priced higher - and since they are not because they suck in comparison, good luck with that. :)

If you need your dream fulfilled, go check the Cuda and Stream high end Commercial rendering cards and maybe you'll have a glow of red pride.Reply

It's like your idiotic "feeling" that people who need high end GPGPU cards are going to buy the stupidly cheap and driverless gaming card by amd called the 7970 or the 7950. The COMPUTE CARDS cost THOUSANDS of dollars each. You people have turned into drooling idiots repeating dummy of world talking points.I mean the absolute stupidity is really irritating.

You have failed miserably. I can assure you of that. That is, by displaying fairly and squarely in a public forum that you do not know anything about GPU computing and when you are wised up to it, you go ahead and sample workstation graphic cards. NVIDIA has that class of cards, too. It is called Quadro. Both Firepro and Quadro brands where there long before GPU computing took off, and both brands where equally proportionally priced far higher above the mainstream gaming cards. Those cards use the same chips that mainstream cards too, with wider io capabilities and most important of all highly tuned drivers. And surprise, surprise, the compute prowess of a Firepro or Quadro card is the same as the gaming mainstream cards . It is in the control that those cards exercise on what gets out of the card, that sets them apart. So, there you go. Blow off all the air you can. It is not going to change anything. You have no idea about what you are talking about.Reply

You fail again, you miserable know nothing. Just because you talk too much, way way over your coupon, doesn't mean you have said anything of significance. What imbecile would cite Firepro as a computing GPU! Oh, you just did, and even fail knowing what you, your very self, said. GPU computing with Firepro or Quadro. That is stupid. How did you come up with that? Reply

You fail again, you know nothing imbecile.All modern GPUs come with compute capabilities. You fail again in reading and absorbing basic facts. You fail in reading and remembering what you have said on this very thread and yet expect to be taken seriously.Read up thread once again. Firepro and Quadro use the same chips that are used in mainstream, consumer cards. It is the drivers and outside of the chip, i.e. on the board, where the differences emerge. 7970 is far, far superior to NVIDIA for HPC and compute heavy applications. 580 is a lot better than 680 when it comes to GPU computing. That is what Anandtech called " What is left behind" with the 680. 680 is more power efficient than 7970 by about 10% on load. On idle power efficiency is about the same, with 7970 even better. Yet 7970 is about twice faster than NVIDIA. That means having half the number of 7900 chips in an HPC application will achieve the same result at half the cost. And since 580 is discontinued, NVIDIA is in a lot of trouble. They will have to rely on 570 chips for any competition with 7900 chips. That is NVIDIA's crowning achievement in the retro computing department.

Frankly, HPC is not the domain of gamers, and I am not surprised that you are totally ignorant about it. Reply

Well you have no point just more amd fanboy rhetoric, and you've been wrong how many times in a row now ?Let's just add up your number of posts here and we'll give you a big break and count one "WRONG!" for each of your posts. I'm (not) looking forward to you explaining the 7970 loser status on the benches compute page in the review, because you won't, you can't and amd lost, and you're sad and pissed and frankly you don't understand why, obviously, ever lessening is the outside chance you could actually bring yourself to admit it's loss.

And let's add, since another amd fanboy has a big problem again - let's add, the great and "superior" amd Tahiti "gpu compute monster ! housefire !" gpu loses miserably in the compute benchmarks in this review, loses 3 tests to nVidia, to the gpu teh amd fanboys have spewed is very, very bad in compute compared to their loser amd 7970 core.

Hey, how about that, now we both have some compute to talk about, and how amd is a loser failure, and nVidia won again, even in compute ! :)

Wow, I guess compute is really, really, really important like all the amd fanboys have been saying this entire thread.Reply

Here's the idiot spew from you about compute on the prior page, amd fanboy: " Anyway, 7970 is a superior product over 680 if only for the compute performance it offers."LOLIt lost the benches here clueless.ROFLI love my amd fanboy friends.Reply

Which benchmark are you talking about, know nothing imbecile? You are talking about this review? Are you trying to tell us that you cannot read or count? We already know that. Oh, you are trying to tell us that NVIDIA cannot get its act together even on the one benchmark that it has always done good, with 670 falling behind everyone? Hey, you are making progress. The NVIDIA way. Keep it up. You are doing fine.Reply

One of my SLI 570s crapped out last month. Knowing the 670 was on the horizon but not willing to wait, I grabbed a 680 for $520 (EVGA Superclocked 2682 model - the only one that I could grab with F5 tapping). Looking at how close the 670 is to the 680, and (as of right now) looking at all the stock of 670s on Egg, I overspent by $100 when I could have had the Superclocked 670. I had no idea the performance was going to be that close.

And who would have thought these things would actually be available? Kicking myself...kicking myself... Reply

At least you didn't spank out $579.99 plus tax and fees on the 7970 - which had a value drop off like rock from a cliff while official drivers were still absent. $130 plus tax and fees, crappy mismatched and total fail drivers, the usual strange and inexplicable crashing with ten fixes per incident any one of which may work "for a while" or with ones fingers crossed but you never know which one... Yeah dude, I'm not feeling sorry for you.Reply

I like what I'm reading about the 670's performance and huge overclocking ability... but I'm sorry $400 is just too much for a video card for me. I am not the hardcore gamer I used to be, and sad to say I do a lot more on the console now than the PC. I mean when a card costs more than my car payment, that is just sad. For what? Bragging rights? 10 fps faster in Skyrim? Anything over 60 fps is pure gravy, people.

Needs to get to $200 or less for this kid to get into the game. And I doubt 660 gets under that. I have a sneaky feeling they are going to make the 660 $299 and the 650 will be $199. Assuming a TI something doesn't pop up in the $250 range which probably will.

My "old" GTX 460 768mb can limp along for a few more months. Heh, that has been a good little card and it was only $150.Reply

Well that's fine and dandy for you. But others have invested in 3 monitors and are running 5760x1080/1200 resolutions or one expensive one at a 2560x1440/1600. Older cards and especially sub-$400 cards just aren't going to run those kinds of resolutions with details up, which defeats the purpose of getting said monitors in the first place.

PC gaming to play the latest and greatest maxed out never has been, nor will it ever be, cheap. I also am an avid console player (PS3). Dirt 3 and Crysis 2 on my PS3 and 55" LED looks like a PS2 game compared to it running DX11 on my PC with a 27" 2560x1440 LCD monitor and maxing out things with my 680. Reply

"I would like to see a 7970OC comparison? I was trying to find a 680 but gave up and got an 7970oc for $499 it's running at 1025Mhz and should be faster than a 680."

No need really--unless you want to use the latest and greatest benchmarks in an on-line pissing contest. Let's face it. ANY high-end card, including now what AMD calls mid-range (the 7800 series) will run a 1920x1200 display with no trouble. Upgrade to three displays (5760x1200) or one 2560x1600 display, and now the high-end cards make sense. But keep track of the evolving drivers...the original 7970 benchmarks are now dead letters given the 12.4 drivers. Fixing lots of little gotchas in the drivers means that now you don't need two cards to drive a three screen display. This is true of both nVidia and AMD. (Compare the benchmarks here with the launch benchmarks for the 680. The 7970 wins several benchmarks now, which will last until nVidia has some non-launch drivers. Since you are getting more performance than you originally paid for, just sit back and enjoy it.)

Oh, and one other point which is starting to become an issue: 3d graphics. When I find a 3d display that doesn't give me headaches with a few hours use, I'll buy one. Right now though, it is already clear that 120 fps displays will be needed for that, and AMD has been considering 90+ fps out of the ROPs as sufficient--at least with 2560x1600, non-Crossfire. :-(Reply

Well eachus amd fanboy friend, instead of calling him and idiot owner of the 7970 in a useless pissing contest, why don't you just tell him the truth ? The 7970 LOSES @ 1,025 core clock to the stock 680.+And yes, amd sucks when it comes to 3d gaming, while nVidia is the king and has the market absolutely cornered.Reply

Excellent review. Excellent card! One thing I didn't see was image quality. Both in game and video/HT capability. I know its not a common thing amoungst gamers and self builders, but we do complete systems and always found that AMD does a better job with video than NVIDIA. Most noticable are old TV show rips or youtube videos. Do you have any opinion? Just want to know if its a good allrounder or only good at games.Reply

Actually we have had few reports, and they have been pretty even on both sides, but the only time I have had to turn off hardware acceleration is with TMT5 SIMHD engine with any HD7000 card, and I have seen the flash problems you are talking about, but strangly only on notebooks, not desktops. I do believe a fix is in the works for TMT though. I really hope so. Anyway, I am not looking at it from a fanboy point of view. I will give my customers what they want, but will push the most capable product for their application and for a long while now this has generally been AMD graphics with Intel CPU's. This has come up well as we have had an incredibly low failure rate.

Support is important and in the last 6 months I have worked with both ASUS and AMD support to correct issues in motherboards and driver bugs, and as long as they get fixed I am happy, providing it’s not a really big issue to start with.

I’m sure you have worked with 1200 graphics cards in the last 4 years and know exactly what you are talking about, and offer support to match the warranty, which in our case is 2 years.

I am excited about the 600 series though, and will look to stock the GTX670 when the prices settle.Reply

Hundreds of graphics cards but not 1200 graphics cards, so yes I do know what I'm talking about, and I'm not stuck in a corporate environment where information and standard responses are a required line to be towed, so it's likely my experience this past year is actually far wider than yours.

In any case, you allude to "pretty even on both sides" with flash player problems, but before you claimed youtube was great with amd, or at least claimed some sort of superior image quality - and mentioned old movie clips, but by your own comparison you must be servicing nVidia cards as well, or perhaps you are not, and the choice was made and now...

So to me that appears to be your corporate environment talking as you'll go with whatever your masters say is happening, and it is said to be better then, by default necessity - as whomever decides in the power structure will in effect be demanding employees tow that line, it is after all, foolish to do otherwise, especially in a forum where you could be easily discovered doing so.

I frankly find your surprise lack of knowledge with flash player issues disturbing, but attribute it to the call center corporate support model.

Anyway go ahead with your issue, and find the answer you need. I think you should do well with whatever it is you need for answer, and think no doubt that has already been determined.

You assume a lot. There isn't much of your argument there that actually holds any truth, and you are the foolish one to assume otherwise. To me it appears you are just looking for a fight. No better than a common troll. And as a result I won't bother with a rebuttal or correcting any of your assumptions.Reply

Since image quality is almost entirely a function of architectural improvements as opposed to the individual SKUs, we don't do a major IQ writeup for every card. For Kepler in game image quality hasn't changed (NVIDIA hasn't changed any of the fundamental algorithms). As for HT/video, we're hoping to have something up soon once we can secure a more HTPC-suitable GK107 card.

Thanks Ryan. Yeah, I knew its an architectural thing. I build some very high powered HTPC as gaming systems and since this card will no doubt end up shipping with smaller coolers, it seems like a great card to put in a gaming HTPC. Looking forward to the HTPC review though.Reply

Gee what programs are you going to use the amd card for in compute ?I'd sure like to hear for once what amd can do, instead of experiencing it's massively frustrating failures and apologists and recent unbelievable hypocrits.What the heck "compute" are you using a 7970 for - I'd sure like to know what programs... and what exactly stream is capable of, but all we ever get is a blank and some fat slow drooling talking point, except when it's pointed out that nVidia has ten thousand more drivers and support and software base in compute so it's the only way to go. Would you enlighten us ?Reply

I normally like to read the comment section here, but honestly can't be bothered since certain trolls have come here and for the 10th time (in the last 2/3 years), get to run a riot for a few weeks until someone at Anandtech finally butts in and bans him.

Yawn to this scenario once again.

Move to Disqus, Anandtech, and start moderating. You'll get 500 comments per important article and won't have to let controversy and trolls stay to bolster discussion.Reply

Civ5 " On our final test the 7970 sees a slight resurgence compared to the past few games, preventing NVIDIA from sweeping the whole back half of our tests. "Well, actually, that's not nVidia sweeping "the whole back HALF" that's nVidia sweeping the entire last 75% or 3/4ths, and if it weren't for the TWS2 bug, amd could claim only 2 out of 10 games, losing a FULL 80%, more than 3/4ths of all gaming tests.

Instead of hearing the awful truth since the 7970 dives as resolution goes up losing miserably, which is ALWAYS pointed out when nVidia cards react that, puttting down some imaginary problem the reviewer guesses at concerning nVidia, instead we hear how amd shows a slight "resurgence" like a good terrorist card, and it's not noted it's only at the lowest resolution shown, of course.Next the reviewer tells us how the 600 series doesn't do very well "against the 500 series" here - yet the 580 BEATS the 7950 at both 1920 and at 2560 - in other words, the truth is, the GTX500 series does EXCEPTIONALLY WELL here, smacking down even the "resurgent" amd cards brother. The 570 is about 40% and then 30% ahead of the 6970, as another example of how well the 500 series plays this game. That's extended performance, not 600 series "interesting it's not far ahead". Of course, IMO only an amd fanboy could come up with that kind of wording and analysis. Was it so "interesting" that the reviewer couldn't see the 580 and 570 cleaning the clocks of their competition and even above their competition ?

So when the nVidia just prior tier does well, it's the current card not doing so well against it.

When the current nVidia cards do win 75% of the games against amd, it's belittled to less than half, with the special less than half "sweep" phrasing, with the 7970 amd flagship losing past the lowest tested resolution as the "catch". What a bad joke for Nvidia the pro amd words are in these reviews games pages.Reply

When amd has trouble with a game, the reviewer, completely unaware of any amd deficiency (as any good fanboy), has no explanation at the ready, nothing he has been watching for as an identified weakness - unlike the nVidia cards, where the reviewer is on constant watch for what he believes are nVidia card weaknesses. " Skyrim is a game that for inexplicable reasons AMD just has some trouble with that NVIDIA doesn’t, possibly driver overhead."

Yes, we know, if amd doesn't do well, it's inexplicable. Something just has to be wrong. Somehow reality has warped.Then after noting the 670 win fairly, we get this:

" At 1920 we’re clearly CPU limited even with all of Skyrim’s graphical features turned up. "

Instead of saying the 570 beats every amd card at that resolution, or even noting every amd card is stacked at the bottom, period, it's a "cpu problem" - amd didn't fail, the cpu did...

That's not all - after seeing the 570 spank every amd card at the 1920 resolution the reviewer goes on attack, since he mentioned of course earlier in the article nVidia brought up the 570, meaning it would be part of their line up he said, so attacking it is a must, as any good fanboy knows. Never mention is has spanked the 7870 and 7850 and even the 7970 once (civ5) and never mention it spanks the whole amd tier in this game with texture packs and it's "puny memory" at 1920, but go after it...

" GTX 670 is greatly improving on the GTX 570 due to the latter’s lack of memory. 1.25GB is cutting it close here with the high resolution texture pack "

There you have it. Once again. The GTX570 spanks every amd card at 1920 but all it gets is a big fat cut down for 2560.

Here again, an nVidia win is inexplicable. Instead we hear about the amd "strength".When nVidia wins, remember it's unclear why because it should not be happening, amd has a superior strength !

" At this point it’s not entirely clear why the GTX 600 series does so well here (both AMD and NV use SGSSAA), especially given the fact that the Radeons have a memory bandwidth advantage."

Now we can listen to the "on paper" amd fanboys, and the endless fantasy that future drivers and future games mean amd is the "future winner" for the newest cards tested and compared.

Never will we hear the amd core "technology" is weaker and has some severe caveats when it comes to game engines and implementation.

Instead, that with much superior "paper horsepower" on "notional multiplications" based upon less than fully accurate simplified calculations omitting severe bottlenecks in amd architecture and adding in guesses for the "tricks" amd has to "overcome" them, we will always be told the above, instead of the truth.AMD core design is inferior for most of the game engines.Reply

Are you aware the post you copied is the reviewers words, smarty pants ?Do you realize I was criticizing the reviewers words, his "bandwidth" notional advantage for amd ?Do you realize you just called the reviewer and idiot and agreed with me ?

YOUR words > " do you, or do you not remember NVIDIA cards with 192/384/512 memory bandwidth and how much good this "advantage" brought to them? compared to AMD 128/256 bandwidth of the same generation?"

Now tell it to the reviewer dumb dumb, since you copied and pasted HIS WORDS from my post, his words, words for word from the review !

ROFLMAO - yes you maybe should become a paid operative for amd, you have the intelligence for it - get everything wrong then attack - you're perfect for them :)Reply

nope. i do not realize that. i don't memorize each word of review to be able to write 2/3 comments of 22-pages thread...

and i didn't call anyone "an idiot".

what i said is what i believe (furthermore, it could be backed up by numerous reviews from that time - all of them also written by reviewers, perhaps on your surprise). whether this reviewer agrees with me or not on this topic is a simple matter of opinions, and review itself doesn't burst with hate as all your posts do.Reply

Who knows what you said, it isn't clear, because you didn't make it clear.Believe whatever it is you believe,as that is also unclear, and only your opinion, since no facts are present for you, according to you.

Of course you only see hate from me, since I point out the amd flaws, and amd is your fanboy fave, as your other posts clearly show, and no you don't sense hate from the reviewer as he coddles amd, as I pointed out, and that gives you a nice warm feeling of "good opinion" vibrations.ROFL

PS- you called me a lot worse than an idiot, so don't cop out on your hate filled spewing. Of course who expects anything less from an amd fanboy.

Let's go with this, so you don't forget, or try to claim white snowy innocence - I certainly hope a bunch of obvious amd fanboys ignore every fact and facet I've presented, and dive, "driven" as you noted, right (back) into their beloved failure, with someone like you doing that, I couldn't receive any greater and lovely reward for my efforts here.Reply

i did question your sanity, which i found more than ever a reasonable question. i'm surely not only one who shares this doubt. as for anger-management - i don't find this insulting, you should rather stop living in denial that you have one

i did not called reviewer "an idiot", which you implied.

i was not aware that you are making efforts of any kind, except to comment every sensible post of any author with your irrelevant raging about something else... now that you explained it so well, i'll probably stay off your noble crusade of enlightening people with wildly subjective and/or incorrect claims... at least as long i feel like it

facts behind my claims are clearly stated and usually well-known and proven. your last two posts doesn't have single fact, btw

now reap the benefits of your great reward, whatever you might think it isReply

Oh stop being a liar, you got outed so now you can't stand yourself. Let's go with near page one where one of your fellow amd fans haphazardly claims the 365mm die of the amd card is so close to the 300mm die of the nVidia card that amd price dropping again is no problem.

Another amd snake applauded the post for the sanity it contained. ( merely because amd fanboyism was served well, of course)

I had to point out, with considerable effort and for the greater good ...

(let's face it amd fans should be ponying up profit dollars for the hurting amd, not demanding low prices be lowered again - it's called putting your money where your mouth is, and where your heart is in this case, something the amd zealouts apparently have, to only their personal and selfish advantage, trained themselves out of - a rude, and debilitating issue for amd - who IMO has greatly encouraged that suicidal behavior )

...that the 365mm die is over 43% larger than the 300mm die.

Now there's just a single example of what needs to happen much more often, so that we can be well informed persons instead of lying brainwashed monkeys.

I certainly do not mind a big 'ol fanboy, in fact that's great, but let's bring it up to a level where a fan can be a self respecting and respected addition, not in need of constant lies, and endless unethical misconduct, right ?

A fanboy should easily support his view with the truth and not be in need of anything other, and as I fairly point out, an honorable fanboy won't be hellbent on squeezing every last dollar from their favorite producer while at the same time preaching corporate profitability "lessons" or sideway gloatings of the same, in direct opposition to their stated personal savings conduct goal and oft lofted talking point rhetoric.Reply

die size is in mm2 and NOT in diameter (mm). do your math again... and gtx680 die is 294mm2... to your pleasure, it increases the size difference... the real one, not the 43% you came out with - somehow

now, these were two of the things you learned from me :)

reading more, instead writing would help you, as well anger-management i suggested earlier :)Reply

Why then I await your math calculation.I'll let you know now I'll be back after 3 seasons pass to give you time to prepare your answer.

It doesn't surprise me one iota the stupid amd fanboy even increased the nVidia core size for that always needed amd liar cheat, nor that praise for his sanity followed on unopposed except by yours truly. Sometimes letting a liar even have part of his lie and still proving him wrong is good enough.

No need however to correct my shorthand text concerning circular vs rectangular area, but as I imagine the stupidity you are surrounded with inside your own head you thought it a possibility, and it clearly indicates you didn't read the part of the thread discussed as well. Reply

on the other hand, unlike you, i know how to calculate, maybe that explains why your mistake was so obvious to me...

"stupidity you are surrounded with" - sadly, true - but i'm only surrounded by you... but than again, it's the only reason i even talk to you - it's kinda fun because i don't get angry at all (quite the opposite), and you're spilling poison - seriously, how long you spent on writing that 1,000,000 comments about nvidia being better?

i've spent about half an hour talking to you in total, and for own amusement purposesReply

man, i KNOW math, you DON'T. otherwise, it would strike you immediately for 2x mistake you made in post (lets assume square was a type, thought i'm not quite sure).

now ~20% means ABOUT and it is that way because it applies in similar fashion to both bigger-than and less-than scenarios, things you wouldn't of course know anything about

but then again, i proclaim FULL VICTORY for you on math issue, you were right all along, even when you wrote 43, 46 or whatever you did in the first place (without "~" which means "approximate" for you, and you didn't used it, meaning it was exactly 43 (or 46, whatever))

you're mathematical genius and i envy you a great deal on vast amount of hardware knowledge you have. happy?Reply

Here we get it again, since nVidia's 670, the card under review did better than expected, something is wrong...

" For reasons that aren’t entirely clear Batman isn’t as shader performance bottlenecked as we would have expected, leading to it doing so well compared to the GTX 680 here. "

Something is wrong, Batman is not so shader bottlenecked, and since it's so easy, the "harvested"(defective according to the reviewer) 670 core can do well.

What happened to the 570 attack this time ? Nothing, since.the 570 beats the 7870 at 2560 here, but since we can't cut the 570 down, we won't mention it.

Instead of mentioning the 670OC beats the amd flagship at the highest resolution 5760x1200, the reviewer has to play that down, so only mentions the 670OC "coming to parity" with the 6970 at middle resolution, 2560, after the STOCK 670 beats the amd 7970 at the low 1920 resolution !ROFL - once again the analysis favors and coddles amd.

" EVGA’s overclock, even if it’s once again only around 3%, is just enough to close that gap and to bring the GTX 670 to parity with the GTX 680 and the 7970. "

No, the OC shows the 670 beating the 7970 at the highest triple screen 5760 resolution, and the STOCK 670 BEATS THE 7970 at the lowest resolution, 1920... so somehow "that's parity".How the heck does that work ?

Do we hear once in all this game page commentary what the 7950 at the very same $399 as the 670 price is doing ?I don't think we do.Where is that ?Instead of attacking the 7950 that is currently the same price as the 670, we get the reviewer over and over again attacking the GTX570 that he notes nVidia mentioned to him, making him think the GTX570 will be part of nVidia's line up for some time he states. Not once did he point out how well the GTX570 did against the amd competition.Not once do swe hear how the 7950 costs the same but loses, loses loses. Nothing specific.Instead we hear 670 vs 680 or attack the 570, or make excuses for the 7970 or call it inexplicable.. Reply

You can blame silverblue who begged for proof about the bias in these articles. Go call your buddy so you can both smack talk about me, or heck post it here openly like you do, why not you're innocent no matter what you do as an amd fanboy, right ?Reply

Here we are treated to 5 paragraphs of attack on the 600 series, note the extreme phrasing given against, the "known problem" of the GTX cards, not the "inexplicable" results that means something is wrong other than with the amd card when it loses.

This contrasts with the bland put downs the 670 compared to the 680 and 570 receive when they win by enormous comparative margins in the rest of the game pages.

So the reviewer has a field day here:" Overall performance isn’t particularly strong either. Given the price tag of the GTX 670 the most useful resolution is likely going to be 2560x1600, where the GTX 670 can’t even cross 30fps at our enthusiast settings."

Completely unmentioned of course after the jab at pricing just for the 670, same price as the 7950 that fares not playably better here and gets spanked the other 75% of time, is the 5760x1200 higher resolution where the 670 achieves even higher frame rates than 30, surpassing 30 all the way up to 35.6, just below 35.8 for the 7950, two tenths of one frame.Somehow, that isn't mentioned, only the lower 2560 resolution with lower frame rates (for all the cards) but the 670 singled out as the only card that has peaked at "given the price".

Later in the review completely unplayable frame rates for all cards in a test is used to attack just the 570, too, for lack of memory. Forget the fact that none of the other cards had playable frame rates.

Eye candy was turned down at the triple monitor resolution but that has never before made 2560 most useful for reviews here, especially with lower frame rates for all the cards tested at the lower resolution settings. Only when we can cut down nVidia is such a statement useful, and it is very definitely confined to just the nVidia card then. So avoided is the paltry frames of the other competing cards even at "easier" 5670 settings.If the 670 is no good past 2560, then neither are any of the other cards at all, except the 7970 ? Maybe the reviewer suddenly has decided 5670 gaming is no good.

" Even 1920x1200 isn’t looking particularly good. This is without a doubt the legitimate lowpoint of the GTX 670. "Well, then the 7950 doesn't look good at 1920 either, less than 1 fps difference, not to mention the 680 that is within in couple frames.If we take the reviewers words with their total meaning, what we have is the unsaid statement that - only possibly the 7970 should be used for this game at 5670, no other card though.

Now - a total examination of the Crysis Warhead gaming page fps charts reveals this: Every card is unplayable at every resolution except for the latest respective releases in 1920X1200 chart.Reply

... still unreachable for me on what budget is concerned. The 660Ti is what I'm looking for but as I saw somewhere it may be 5 or 6 months away and I don't know if I can wait that long. My old C2D need's replacement. I may just grab a 560Ti and later down the road get 760Ti skipping 6xx generation... bittersweet :-\Reply

what gpu do you have now? You said you need to upgrade your core 2 cpu but didnt say what you have for a gpu.

Im still running a gts 250 and getting pretty good fps on everything but BF3 at pretty high specs on a 19x12 monitor. Your major issue with games today is they are made for consoles with dx9 cards in them that came out in 2006. So with some exceptions (crysis, metro 2033, and bf3 for example) you dont really need a huge card for anything other than playing all the new games at max spec. Sure everyone wants to do that but you dont necessarily NEED to. I played metro2033 and had physx on and it was easily playable in the 30-40 fps range.

So if you upgrade your cpu (which btw you really only need to upgrade to a quad core if its a gaming rig to get the max fps a cpu upgrade wil give you) and keep your current gpu and then when money allows grab a 670 or 685 or whatever AMD has to offer in your price range. Reply

Do you really want to know? I have a 9600GT :-P Also, I can't call it an upgrade as in "adding some new parts and keeping some of the existing ones". I'm really buying a new machine PSU and tower included. That's why I say it's bittersweet to buy a new machine with previous generation graphics.Reply

hmmm well see what you have for cash left over after buying the important parts. Honestly buying a new system now is a good idea. Ivy bridge being released which drops the prices of sandy bridge (which as I said before will give you the same FPS in game) and even throwing $125 at a 550ti will be a good jump till the end of summer when the 685 comes out, and the 550 wouldnt give you the best fps so youd still be wanting to upgrade. Reply

Your every comment is an attack at ATi/AMD video cards or people who seem to be using them( maybe). Why?You get payed to do negative publicity for AMD on the review sites? Because having a Ati card die on you in the middle of some important event in you gaming life( like raiding in WoW , am I close or am I close ;-) could not be the only reason.Reply

I think the reason for the missing memory chips is because they will be releasing the 685 in aug or sep which is supposed to be 4gb and run on a 512bit bus. It could be possible to increase the size of the gpu core and double the amount of ram and stil have it on a card this length.

30% faster than the 670 (685 is supposed to be 25% faster than the 680 and the 670 is 5% slower than the 680) on the same size card but using 2x8 pin connectors instead of 2x6pin. Now imagine an after market or water cooler on it... yeah.

I guess considering you think $200 equals $335 and that also equals $250, we can say your comment equals a big fat lie, and when a big fat lie is what one immediately starts off with, everyone knows something is WRONG.Reply

I managed to buy one from Amazon before they went out of stock, and I must say, I am pleased. BF3 plays like a champ, Skyrim is smooth as butter, and Adobe Premiere edits like a champ now with Nvidia hardware acceleration. This is on a 1920x1080 monitor with an old q6700 quad core @ 2.666 GHz and 800Mhz RAM. I do not expect to buy another card for a long while. Reply

Are you going to put up with crashing amd drivers and a burning electric bill OC with added instability and a water tower cost and then all of a sudden save a miniscule bit on card cost ? Are you going to add to your suffering with no adaptive v-sync, no also added smooth frame rate target, no instant per game optimum settings from a massive nVidia server farm embedded automagically in the superior nVidia drivers ?

Are you going to stand for no bezel peek feature ?Are you going to put up with the more expensive and hassled 3 monitor connection issues of the amd cards ?Are you going to sit there undisturbed by the epic failure of amd 3D gaming vs Nvidia's available and awesome implementation ?Are you going to put up with no amd 120hz monitor support there too ?

Isn't your original stance there the very opposite of "no one buys these cards to run on just one monitor and certainly not 1900x1200" argument ?

Since the amd overlcocks "so well" as you claim vs nVidia, what is amd releasing a pre overclocked version going to do other than allow amd partners to charge more ?ROFL - it will do nothing.Reply

Prices for the GTX 670 and the HD 7970 are similar in Germany, at max a difference of about 30€. :-)If I had to buy a card today, I'd probably get a GTX 680, but I don't regret the 500€ I spent on a 7970 with a watercooling block and OC capabilities of 1300/1700. :-)Reply

I had been waiting patiently for the release of the 670 or the 660ti, depending on availability, cost and performance. After reading this review of the 670, I bought one on the spot (release day morning, while Newegg still had some)....it was a good decision.

This card replaced an HD6870, and while that was a decent card, it's like night and day. In informal tests I did, I found this card to be twice as powerful in most scenarios. Nvidia has really outdone themselves with their new Kepler architecture. They've created one of the most powerful hyper-parallel architectures available to do, and have done so at greatly decreased power draw and heat (aka: less noise). It's rare to ever see my 670 spike above 60C, with the stock blower cooler.

I know they're on the site in other reviews, but it would be nice if you could include a few dual-GPU cards in the benchmark comparisons. It probably only matters to a few people like me, but it'd be nice to have.

For me, I want them because I'm trying to make a decision: do I get a second 6950 to crossfire with the one I already have for $200, or do I go out and buy a new card?

From what I've seen, outside the edge case games such as Batman and some of the games running on Frostbite, a 6990 pretty much trades blows with the 680 and the 7970. So, I'm thinking that for me, since I have the headroom in my PSU, getting a second 6950 makes a whole lot of sense, even though the setup will consume almost twice as much power as one new card.

Which leader does Anandtech use for the Civilization V Compute test? I'm just curious because my overclocked GTX 670 wipes the floor with all of these cards in almost all of the leader tests, so I want to make sure that I'm looking at the right information.Reply

These are the comments of people reading AnandTech articles? Gamers? Enthusiasts? WHERE?? A bunch of trolls barking at each other. Not one useful comment, not even one to express USER oppinion after USING the card for a while. NOT ONE to say if the colors look better or worse than on the last generation card or the competition ones. You are all just a bunch of ....spit on you trolls!Reply

I've been holding this question unaswered in me for years. I would like to know which card produces the best image quality given the same conditions and settings, a nVidia one or Ati/AMD one. Image quality as in the closest to reality or closest to what the image producer indended. And If I get an aswer I want it argumented, no "because it has PhysX!" "because it rocks!" childish like considerations. Picture examples would be greatly apreciated. Thank you, have a good day and try not to troll too much.Reply

It had to be like that of course. Always against me. Two games I want to play,only two I don;t care about the others: Crysis and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. And what do I see?? nVidia will work on one but not the other, AMD will work on the other one but not on the first one. What the f...k is that!?? What card should I get and why? Pictures please. Money is a concern.Reply